


Earthly

by LittleRedCosette



Series: Cosmic & Earthly, Infinite & Transient [2]
Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Captivity, Drug Use, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Homophobic Language, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, M/M, Mid-Canon, Military Backstory, Non-Linear Narrative, Origins, Possible Character Death, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, Psychological Trauma, Racist Language, Sexual Content, Slow Burn, Threats, Torture, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-08
Updated: 2018-04-01
Packaged: 2019-03-02 09:33:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 50,409
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13315383
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleRedCosette/pseuds/LittleRedCosette
Summary: Arthur smiles, a sad expression, less than pity, more than empathy.He licks his lips and Eames mirrors the movement unconsciously.“You made the right choice,” Arthur says.Eames nods, even though he’s not entirely sure he agrees. He’s made a hundred thousand choices and he doubts very much that many of them have been right.





	1. PART ONE

**Author's Note:**

> This is the second story in this series, but I don't think you need to read them in a particular order... However, if you did do me the honour of reading the previous story, "Infinite", this will probably start to answer some of your questions. If you get through this story and decide you have questions, "Infinite" might answer some of them. 
> 
> I would like to warn you now that there are some opinions expressed here that I absolutely don't believe in, including about Romani people. As I said, absolutely not my views. 
> 
> There will be four parts to this story, which will be followed by two more stories, Transient and Cosmic.
> 
> A review would be lovely, if you have anything to say to me. I love all your thoughts.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The boy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the second story in this series, but I don't think you need to read them in a particular order... However, if you did do me the honour of reading the previous story, "Infinite", this will probably start to answer some of your questions. If you get through this story and decide you have questions, "Infinite" might answer some of them.
> 
> I would like to warn you now that there are some opinions expressed here that I absolutely don't believe in, including about Romani people. As I said, absolutely not my views.
> 
> There will be four parts to this story, which will be followed by two more stories, Transient and Cosmic.
> 
> A review would be lovely, if you have anything to say to me. I love all your thoughts.
> 
> Your LRCx

.

.

**(so call to this)**

.

.

Fourteen years before he kills in cold blood for the first time, Alexander, who will one day be Eames, locks himself in the bathroom with a packet of crayons and draws dragons on the tiles.

His lips bleed, bitten raw with the sullen effort not to cry.

Outside the door, a silence so full of trepidation it might be an executioner’s final breath.

He can hear a lot of voices swirling like clouds of smoke, but they aren’t real. He knows they aren’t.

.

_._

_(He’s not well_ , Nana said to Doctor, who smiled a pale, untrue smile.)

( _He just has an active imagination,_ Doctor said to Mam, who swirled her sherry like it was a crystal ball.)

( _He’s very spiritual_ , Mam said to Nana, who scowled like the witch she was.)

(Father said something else entirely.)

.

.

Alexander, who is not yet Eames, draws dragons on the tiles with angry fists, grunting with effort. Crayon does not stick nicely to tiles, not like Auntie Joan’s pens, only he doesn’t have any of those with him. He wasn’t allowed to pack his bag before he left, stubborn jawed and whimpering.

“Do you know the story of Odysseus?” a voice on the other side of the bathroom door asks. A real one, like Mam.

Only deeper, richer.

Mrs Keel, the man in the suit called her, but she said her name was Abbi.

Alexander, who will be only Eames in twenty years, does not reply.

Abbi tells the story of Odysseus through her bathroom door; all of it, like a poem that lives in her mouth, natural and permanent. Alexander draws dragons on the tiles until all of his crayons are broken.

Until there’s blood on his chin and a blister on his thumb.

.

.

Thirty years later, he thinks about the dragons. Their pastel lines smudged day after day by the steam of the shower.

.

.

The slide of wakefulness is a clean, smooth ride.

Eames opens his eyes in three blinks, stares across the mattress at a soft expanse of dark skin. He reaches out to trace a finger down the valley of Nina’s spine, from the base of her neck to the dip of her coccyx.

Nina shivers, her legs reaching back to kick him lazily.

“Menace,” she mumbles, slurred with sleep. “I was having the most wonderful dream.”

Eames tugs her by the waist to lay flush against him. He nips at the junction of her neck and smiles, rocking teasingly up against the back of her thighs. Despite his efforts, he actually feels barely in the mood for anything more than lazy rutting, followed quite possibly by a joint.

She allows it with catlike condescension.

Her hair is shorter than she usually keeps it. He kisses the back of her head, the strands tickling his face.

“Plenty more where they come from,” Eames replies, one hand on her stomach, the other skimming around her breasts.

“I have to go to work,” Nina groans, making no move to dislodge the man trapping her under the thin sheet covering them both.

The sandy grey light spilling through the open slats of the blinds is gentle; her bedroom smells of the lavender detergent she washes her laundry with, same as last time. She turns a little, kissing slightly to the left of his mouth. Eyes very dark and full of mirth, she smiles at him.

She’s young. It shows in her smile like in nothing else about her.

Despite his proclivity for women at least ten years his senior, he’s found himself increasingly drawn to this tiny flat in Milan, with Nina the photographer.

Nina, darling glitter eyeliner and heavy jewellery and a tight grip, who hadn’t even started school yet when he was getting pushed around by a mean drill sergeant.

He feels her thighs open around his leg, a hot stripe of damp along his hip. She smells of sweat and oranges. Her tongue is wet over his throat and her hands dig into the meat of his arms.

Just as her laughter buries into his mouth, his phone starts to ring.

A loud ringing chirp, hard buzzing over the wood of the bedside cabinet.

“Nnn,” he protests, rolling over her to reach for his phone. Her body is less than pliant beneath his as he locks his knees around her waist, his cock nestled quite perfectly between her breasts, making her laugh delightedly.

The phone vibrates in his hand angrily and he leans over to drop a kiss on her cheek. He frowns at the number lighting up the screen as he kneels, straddling her.

Her hands cup his arse, fingers tracing up and down as if to tug him up to her mouth, though she does nothing more than lick her lips teasingly.

“Is it your wife?” she asks with a grin.

Eames shakes his head, his smile stagnant on his face.

“Just a moment,” he says, tapping her open mouth with his finger.

Swinging himself off the bed, Eames walks out into her living room.

It’s colder here, where warm-blooded bodies haven’t been sleeping and breathing and screwing all night. Eames scowls, shrinking to less than half-mast, grabbing a throw from the back of the sofa to wrap around himself.

This is an awfully nice flat for a barely-twenties photographer, he thinks, not for the first time. Though, he’s not sure he wants to know the answer to his twenty questions.

(Which is, of course, why he’s never asked them.)

The phone in his hand is still ringing but he waits until he’s out on the balcony to answer it, voice grizzled with sleep.

“Make it quick, I was about t-”

_“Read your tea leaves recently?"_

The voice that interrupts is harsh, almost a whisper.

As he looks down at the Milan street below, Eames feels any lingering stirrings of sexual excitement drain out of him, replaced by a hard and uneasy chill.

“Am I going on a long journey?” he asks, snake belly soft in the hiss of the wind above the buildings.

The churches are open, and not much else.

_“Hoping you could tell me. I think I am.”_

“Shit,” Eames says, leaning down onto the cold bar at waist height with one hand, the throw tucked neatly around his hips. “Where are you?”

 _“Doesn’t matter,”_  Arthur replies.

“I can get to you -”

 _“Too late,”_  Arthur insists, a grunt of ugly laughter in his voice.  _“They’re already here."_

Eames crouches to sitting, back against the chilly rail, his knees cracking, and his phone clutched to his ear.

“How did they find you?” he asks, his mind already leaping through where Arthur last made contact.

Their job in Dubai. After that Mexico City, then Toronto.

Then? Had they followed so far, or was it unhappy by-chance?

Arthur’s response is feverish, full of regret.

 _“Mortimer,”_  he says.

“Fuck,” Eames snaps, louder than he means to.

Through the glass door he sees Nina, her naked body crossing the flat to the kitchen, a towel in her hand that she trails after her like a child with a faithful teddy bear.

Eames clenches his jaw. Anger spills through him like his blood seeping out of his veins, drowning his organs.

He is suddenly furious. Furious at this lovely woman with her twelve cameras and no bras, at himself for being so impossibly attracted to a girl technically young enough to be his daughter.

At Arthur’s stupidly soft heart that is at such odds with his sharp shooting and manic driving.

Eames squeezes his eyes shut as the clouds above Milan gather around the sun in a grumpy halo.

“I told you,” he says over Arthur’s self-reprimanding groan. “I fecking told you, if you got yourself tied down by your mistakes, I would let you burn.”

(It’s been twelve years since Eames told Arthur that.)

 _“You’re a liar,”_  Arthur murmurs, but it trembles through the phone and Eames feels his chest seize, cardiac implosion.

“I told you,” he says again as he pushes the panic down, pressing his eyelids hard with a forefinger and thumb.

 _“I know you did,”_  Arthur says, but the last word disappears with a clack of teeth.

Eames sucks in the corners of his mouth. He hears Arthur’s breath, precious, nervous.

_“They’re downstairs.”_

He can see it in his mind’s eye, then. Arthur, crouched low, gun in one hand, mobile in the other, sweat and dirt and dust. Stubble that burns skin with kisses and eyes that see lots of good where there is shit and rot.

“Arthur,” Eames says.

And then Arthur’s voice.

_“I’m scared.”_

He says it with that self-same curiosity as he always did, before. As if he’s surprised to discover he is frightened of what is to come.

It brings a sad, hollow smile to Eames’ face.

“I’ll come get you,” he says, like all he’ll have to do is pop in a car and drive down the road.

(Once, in January, seven feet of snow, one shovel, and a broken foot.)

He sees Arthur, seventeen years old, foul-tempered and hateful.

 _“Send the Architect,”_  he says, quieter still, so that Eames tucks his head into his own lap, straining to hear.

“She won’t have a fucking clue,” Eames snarls. The air inside him is poisonous gas and he feels it staining his lungs like tar. He wants a cigarette. He wants a stiff drink and a handful of unmarked pills.

 _“She’s good,"_  Arthur reminds him, as if Eames could ever forget.

“Your faith in others will be my end,” Eames gripes, not for the first time.

Inside, Nina leaves a glass of coffee on the table before heading to the bathroom.

Across oceans, Arthur chokes back a sob of laughter.

“You know what to do,” Eames reminds him steadily.

Arthur’s fear is not a new phenomenon, but it’s a very particular kind of weapon against Eames’ resilient armour. His eyes sting, his throat aches from all the barbed lies he’s ever told.

He wants more time. Not much, just a little. Just enough to re-memorise all the pieces of this boy who is far out of reach.

 _“I’m so fucking sorry, Alex,"_  Arthur murmurs.

Eames’ bones, brittle chunks of cement under his skin.

“I’m not,” he promises, truthfully. “Not even a little bit.”

Arthur’s breaths quieten to nothing again. Eames thinks he can hear crackling movement through the phone, though he could be imagining it.

 _(I had a vision,_  his Mam said, not just once, but often.)

“Stay on the line,” he orders.

_“I’m out of ammo.”_

Eames takes a breath, steadying, cold in his chest. Sunlit and icy.

“Ton visage est caché,” he promises, lucky charm brave, and he can picture it: Arthur, eyes of fresh death, tucking his phone into his pocket quietly.

He listens to the jostle of fabric, the plunge of voices bellowing in Portuguese.

Arthur’s response, Spanish and lyrical.

Silence, then gunfire.

The call breaks, like a phone cracking over concrete.

.

.

Eames learns three words the first day he stays with Abbi and Rian Keel.

Androgynous. Rambunctious. Supercilious.

These are words he carries with him in a thick papered notebook, along with all the other things he learns. The Greek alphabet, some cockney rhyming slang, and a recipe for nettle soup, which sounds horrible and painful but is actually delicious.

“You have lovely handwriting,” Abbi says as she helps him spell  _fortuitous_ on the third day.

He blushes, glad she didn’t use the last three words that normally follow.

.

.

(You have lovely handwriting for a boy.)

.

.

When the phone call ends, Eames counts to one hundred, gets up, re-enters the flat.

Nina is still in the shower, probably waiting to see if he’ll join her. The coffee she left him is smooth and warm. He sips it calmly, staring at a blown-up portrait photo of a woman wearing only a necklace and pair of heels.

It’s a distressingly trashy image, the yellow glare of the background, her brown skin and blue choker and pink shoes. Eames loves it. The amused defiance in the model’s eyes, her purposefully downturned mouth.

 _(My raison d'être,_ Nina had called it, which was confusing and fantastic.)

Eames looks at the photo canvas on Nina’s wall. Thinks about Arthur, whom he now realises is probably in Brazil. After seven sips, he makes a phone call.

A voice answers, short, cut with the dull of a toothpick held between teeth.

_“Parlez maintenan , or forever hold your peace.”_

“C’est Anton,” Eames says. “J’ai besoin de ton aide.”

_“Parlez maintenant, Anton.”_

.

.

He leaves before Nina’s out of the shower.

She’ll probably not forgive him, but he doubts their paths will cross again.

.

.

(And in any case, he really is old enough to be her father.)

.

.

The problem is, Eames told Arthur over a decade ago:

_I’m going to help you. But if you think for one moment I will go out of my way to pull you out of any hot water you recklessly find yourself jumping in... I just won’t do it. Understand? I’m not in the business of charity._

.

.

Five weeks later Arthur, who was not yet Arthur to anyone but Eames at that point, was known to the world only as _Jeremy,_  goes on a deep cover operation.

Eames waits three days before he starts the search party.

.

.

**(a man without)**

.

.

Alexander Dalrymple, otherwise known as Dally, is placed decidedly into the hands of the military to serve Her Majesty when he is eighteen years old. On his birthday, in fact.

The night before, his mother calls, weeping drunk, her voice like an injured walrus through her wine glass.

 _“I’ve had a vision,”_  she trembles.  _"You will be gone from me tomorrow.”_

Alexander, standing in the hallway by the phone hooked to the wall, eyes darting wildly up to his father’s office. He doesn’t bother pointing out he has been  _gone from her_ for ten years, now.

Sally Scott howls down the phone at her boy, brays like a kicked donkey and Alexander blushes in humiliation and discontent to hear his mother’s affection for him so violently released.

It wasn’t a vision at all, as he will discover later. Not that he ever really believed it.

It had been a plan set in motion, built long before she even thought about spreading her legs for her husband’s business partner, before the arguments and the broken mirrors and Alexander’s bad exam results.

It was, in fact, the plan all along.

She’d simply drunk half a bottle of gin, even more sherry and a lot of cabernet sauvignon, then dreamed up the ghost of her twin sister, who reminded her she’s about to lose her son.

On the phone that night, however, on the eve of his eighteenth birthday, all Alexander Dalrymple knows is that his mother, who loves him even more than she loathes him, is distraught to think her son is growing up,  _has_ grown up, without her.

It is the last time he ever speaks to her.

.

.

He sees her once, when his name isn’t Alexander anymore. She’s haggard with drink, prideful and vulgar and he sees all of himself in her, like a mirror turned inwards on his soul.

He walks away in shame as her knees hit the puddles in the ground.

.

.

(In spite of this, she will outlive her only son.)

.

.

She’ll write  _Dear Dally_ on all of her letters. He’ll write four in response.

The first he’ll sign  _Alexander._

The last, he’ll sign  _Eames._

.

.

“I suppose being a piece of furniture is still an upgrade for you, isn’t it,  _Eames?"_  Jason Ogilvie asks with a snort as he cops a cigarette from Eames’ stash one night.

It’s mostly playful, but there’s an edge of viciousness to every word Jason Ogilvie says. He grew up adored in theory and dismissed in practice, leaving him a little desperate and very  _supercilious,_  and it shows.

(Eames has kept his little notebook of learnings. He has seventeen of them now.)

Eames, who by now is Corporal Dalrymple, just sucks in another puff of smoke. Blows it right in Jason’s face.

Then he blows Jason, too.

.

.

The name, of course, is meaningless.

Over the course of his lifetime he will tell people all sorts of rubbish. That it’s for his father James and his mother Evelyn. That he was conceived on one, born on one.

That it’s an acronym for his actual, regal name.

Really, though, it’s just a word he likes. The drag of the  _ea_ followed by the bumblebee mumble of the rest.

He remembers seeing it written down for the first time in one of his Aunt’s catalogues.

_Eames Chair: red, black, grey, white._

So, he chooses Eames because it’s a pleasant word to say. An easy one to mutter over and over mid-fuck. Fancy and plain. It feels utterly dull compared to Alexander William Thomas Dalrymple.

 _(Dally Scott_ to his mum’s friends, after the divorce.)

.

.

(Eventually, his passport says Emmett Eames, born in Nigeria. He makes it in a few hours, while the blood on his head congeals around the stitches and he keeps his ear out for the phone ringing. He gets a stamp at the border of Canada when he arrives two weeks later.)

.

.

But it’s more than that, isn’t it?

It’s a name he first chooses when he’s twelve years old. A name that means neutral.

At his father’s, he is Alexander. At his mother’s, Dally.

Eames is the chair that sits at both tables, unflinching. He pulls it out of Auntie Joan’s catalogue like a genie from a lamp, granting all of his wishes.

Anonymity, identity, and a word to tell people when they ask if he has a nickname.

.

.

**(feature, nor cadence)**

.

.

So, when Eames is eighteen, his father ships him off to the military to learn how to be a real man.

It is here he learns the true price of his father’s mistakes and his mother’s confidence.

Honestly, it’s a good thing he gets snapped up by MI6 before he turns twenty.

(At least, it feels like it at the time.)

.

.

“We’ve got a job for you, Dalrymple,” says a man behind a wide oak desk, wearing a suit that, in Eames’ personal and less than humble opinion, is far too nice to have ever seen a real day’s  _work_ at all.

“A job?” he asks with polite curiosity instead of voicing this concern.

The man places his clasped hands beneath his chin, emulating every Enid Blyton worthy picture of a school headmaster that there ever was. It’s not a good look for SAS, Eames thinks, though he doesn’t say this either because he doesn’t really think he’s supposed to know that, yet.

“You all but failed the IQ tests we set you,” the man, whose name is Robertson, says indignantly. “But you’re far from stupid. I’m led to believe you not only flunked them purposefully, but that you know  _why_ we were setting them in the first place."

It is at this point that Robertson rifles through a series of papers on his desk and produces Eames’ recognisably tidy scrawl. Underlined in red all over the page are his mentions of the same inexplicable name.

_Oneiroi Oneiroi Oneiroi Oneiroi Oneiroi Oneiroi_

Eames tilts his head at this, wearing a mask of vapid vacancy that he perfected as a child, during all those lengthy conversations with his parents’ lawyers.

Robertson continues, “Major Hammond here thinks it’s preposterous.”

He gestures to the man sitting beside Eames.

Hammond, a ruddy faced soldier with a mean scowl, purses his lips.

“Well, boy?” Robertson demands. “How did you find out?”

Eames sits back in his chair, taking great pleasure in slouching in front of Major Hammond, who only last month made him do an additional twelve circuit laps for his bad posture. He shrugs innocently.

“Sometimes I just know things, sir,” he says, boldly bewildered.

A snort of bull stomping breath beside him.

“Don’t give us your gypsy fucking tripe, Dalrymple,” Hammond snarls impotently. “Your horse-fucking ancestors did not tell you about Operation Oneiroi!”

Hammond blushes when Robertson raises his eyebrows, piping down even as he throws a particularly withering look at the boy.

Eames preens just a little while Robertson appraises him in this new, mystic light conjured by Hammond’s accusation.

Robertson’s older than Hammond by at least ten years, but he doesn’t seem worse off for it.

He has a thin goatee, oily black like his hair, and the aura of power emanating from his heavy desk and charcoal suit and gold pinky ring is emphasised by the way he never really seems to move. His eyes drift, his face is expressive, yet beyond that he seems more mirage than man.

Eames likes him, he decides in the midst of that penetrating silence. He likes this man more than every other shithead he’s met in the past nineteen months.

“That will be all, thank you, Major Hammond,” Robertson says coolly. “Have Corporal Dalrymple’s things removed from the barracks at once.”

Hammond, fuming, almost topples his chair as he stands. He leaves with only a curt nod to Robertson, is almost at the door when Eames turns in his seat to look back.

“Oh, sir,” he says gleefully. “If it’s not too much trouble, I have a decent stash of playing cards in the lining of my bunk mattress. Do make sure they get packed, too.”

Hammond chooses ignoring him over walking back across the room to slap him one last time.

Eames is still grinning as he sits back down properly in his seat, surprised by the very sudden elation in his chest, as if he has just been injected with helium.

Robertson doesn’t smile at the joke, though he doesn’t dish out a reprimand either, which means he probably found it a little funny too.

Reaching into a drawer of his desk, Robertson takes out a sheaf of paper. He puts it down in front of Eames, along with a black pen, HB pencil and timer.

“I want you to answer every question, Alexander,” Robertson says pointedly. “You aren’t leaving this office until you do.”

Eames pulls his chair right up to the desk, holding the pencil aloft. Robertson smells of ink and a powerful, predatory aftershave.

Eames feels a thrill of excitement.

He opens the papers and rolls up the sleeves of his military green shirt, which he is already mentally preparing to burn in a ceremonial sacrifice to his supposed horse-fucking ancestors.

“All right, sir,” he replies, a flush of pride in his cheeks and relief making his hands shake.

It takes him thirty-two minutes.

.

.

He is nineteen years and eight months old. His hair is gold, wheat chafed brown and his muscles are wiry.

He scores 98.72%.

He leaves for Newcastle the next day. Calls his dad, but there’s no answer.

.

.

Four years later, he flies first class to a secondary army base in Washington DC under the name Captain Alexander Garnett. He had asked for Bond; was given only stern looks for his grin.

On the flight, he gets through multiple bottles of champagne. He’s welcomed at the landing site by a surly Sergeant, who shows him to his quarters most reluctantly.

He’s twenty-three, angrier than he’s ever been and the best dreamshare forger in the United Kingdom.

 _That isn’t saying much,_  he jokes with Robertson before he leaves.  _There are only four of us, after all._

.

.

There’s a rugged, cotton sweat smell of  _army_ that supersedes all others it attains to: boyhood, manhood, testosterone, frustration, isolation, brotherhood.

Smells are often the worst triggers, this much Eames knows, but it’s only now he really appreciates it.

Nothing could prepare him for the flashbacks to dirt-licking boot-scraper days like walking into the hall of the Washington Somna Base. He sees over twenty sharp short crew cuts; starched collars and a sea of green.

All men, this unit. Irritating, he thinks, because it’s usually the women, few as they are in this neck of the woods, who ask the sensible questions first.

Eames stands at the front feeling like a supply teacher on his first day.

Twenty-six stony faces stare back at him from their seats.

“Gents,” their CO, Lieutenant-Colonel Colcan, says from beside Eames. “This is Captain Garnett. He’s UK Military, the best in the business, and he’s here to talk to you today about Mirage Theory. Now, it’s all work-in-progress. I want you to show the Captain how much we appreciate him taking the time to tell us what our overseas brothers have learned.”

There are so many unfathomably incorrect statements in that introduction, Eames is momentarily struck dumb. But as far as the United States are concerned, Eames  _is_ military, so he knows better than to make a snide Quaker remark.

Colcan has a Major Hammond-esque look about him which Eames is mighty unwilling to test. He looks out across the young faces.

Astoundingly young, in fact. Some of these must be only cadets, not even soldiers yet.

There’s a smattering of obligatory applause just long enough for Eames to recover. He smiles, lopsided corner, nods one move of his head.

“Thanks kindly,” he says in his most Hertfordshire voice, earning a pointed, eye-rolling grin from two punks in the front row. “Now, Mirage Theory is  _working_ progress, as your Lieutenant-Colonel says. Emphasis on _working._

“We know full well that with the new PASIV model, courtesy of our esteemed Berlin colleagues, we are able to increasingly keep up with the rapid neuron exchange of our real dreams; our perceptions are happening at beyond real time. Faster than real time.”

“We’ve been doing that for  _years,"_  a cool voice calls out from row three. A large boy, blond and muscular.

“Have you?” Eames scoffs at the beach boy, eyebrows raised even higher than his hackles.  _"You_ personally have managed to go under with a PASIV and create from scratch without pre-set architectural structures? You have, all by yourself, achieved spontaneous creation? Maybe you should come up here and tell everyone what you found.”

Eames steps a little aside, gesturing curtly for the boy to join him at the front. The blond head sinks a little lower amidst his peers.

There’s a ripple of uncomfortable disquiet, murmured chitters mingling with the uppity false bravado of refusing to laugh with the British stranger at the expense of an American brother.

“Mirage Theory,” Eames continues breezily before Lieutenant-Colonel Colcan can intervene, “is the theory that we should be able to create entire illusions inside the dreams.”

“Isn’t it all just illusions?” another boy asks. Front row, thin face and dark hair.

Eames smiles an indulgent, patronising smile that visibly rankles the kid.

“When you eat an apple in the dreamshare, what does it taste like?”

“An apple,” the ruffled boy replies.

“Why shouldn’t, if it’s just an illusion, it be able to taste like an orange?”

The expression on the boy’s face, a face that looks all of fifteen but probably isn’t, makes it all too clear exactly how much of a monumental waste of time this line of thought is. There’s an echo of young thunder in the room; sharks scenting blood.

Eames refrains from actually sighing aloud.

“Put it this way,” he says instead. “Wouldn’t it be ever so useful if you were able to change your face in the dream?”

.

.

The scowling boy, whose name is Jeremy Howard, will one day inform Eames that this is the day he signed up for the international branch.

He won’t be Jeremy by then, though. He will be Arthur.

.

.

Eames (that is,  _Captain Alexander Garnett)_  is a popular and recalcitrant teacher.

He flies to fellow army bases under a false Captaincy approved by MI6, giving lectures and demonstrations in dreamshare, all the while collecting data on other lab teams to find out if anyone knows something his bosses don’t yet.

He also lays the groundwork for what will be the coup of the millennia, but only if he actually manages to pull it off.

It’s easier to make the scientists like him than the soldiers. Being surrounded by army fatigues keeps him permanently on edge, like seeing a knife in a toddler’s hands. He’s exhausted most days and just miserable on others.

Most unfortunately of all, however, he’s  _good_ at what Robertson’s asking of him. Two years later, he gets invited to return to the base in Washington to run a training programme with the US’ brightest.

He goes under pain of being recalled to bootcamp if he doesn’t and there meets a man whom he will one day extract a score of black ops secrets from.

Colonel Louis Wallace.

Colonel Wallace is a round-faced, anxious looking man who is very fond of his unit, introduces each in turn with a good, fair word. Eames tries his best to look only half as indignant as he feels to be here.

“Any standouts?” he asks Wallace, the first evening, brandy and leather sofas and an air of smugness not often found outside of the English gentry.

“Oh, Ingman is an absolute natural,” Wallace says cheerfully. “And Howard, he’s a tough nut but by God, he will get any job done.”

.

.

By now, it’s been seven years since Alexander Dalrymple left home to learn how to be a real man.

It’s been three years since he first used the name that will one day damn him in a room in Romania, where he will kneel bound with zip ties, six fingernails missing.

 _(Dolos,_  he’ll whisper, sly pride and hungry for the bullet.)

.

.

His first full day at Washington Somna, which happens to coincide with his twenty-fifth birthday, is strained to say the least.

.

.

US’ brightest are arrogant little fucks, but they do their jobs well.

A Tuesday, windy, clear skies bleeding sunshine through the windows. They gather together for a huddle like footballers and Eames lets them, only because breaking up the powwow is more trouble in the long term than it’s worth.

“Alpha Team, I want to see you holding the line this time,” Major Hansen says, rocking on the balls of his feet like an antsy father on the edge of the playground.

“Bravo, if any one of you are caught playing hares, I’ll skin you,” Eames offers the second half of the room.

“That only works for marathons, you know, sir,” Lieutenant Jeremy Howard says. He’s as much of a mardy shit as he was two years ago, but it’s tempered with bursts of glee now that make Eames feel a little sorry for the kid.

He’s the youngest in the unit by several years, still a teenager, already a Lieutenant with the smarts to prove why.

“Then it’s a good thing you aren’t running a sprint, isn’t it, Howard?” Eames asks, doesn’t hide his smile. “Don’t worry yourself, Lieutenant. I’ll be sure to let you know when tortoiseshell goes out of fashion.”

The kid blushes, taking his IV line and mangles his smile into a loose frown.

 _Don’t Ask_ is probably the most horrible and useful thing he’s ever encountered, Eames thinks as from the corner of his eye he sees Howard lie flat on his cot, hooked and ready for preparation from the chemist.

“Remember, lads,” Eames continues. “The target is the base.  _However,_ it’s no good to you if you can’t get in once you’re there.”

There’s a murmur of  _Yes sir_ all around that makes Eames feel nauseous to hear.

“Sweet dreams,” he mutters as he presses the plunger and all the men’s eyes close at once.

In the end, Bravo Team win. They get a night off, free passes off base for the coming weekend.

Lieutenant Jeremy Howard doesn’t smile once.

.

.

_Captain, there’s something I need to know._

What is it, Lieutenant?

_Did you really work on the extractions in Warsaw?_

Where on earth did you get that idea?

_I need to know, sir._

Why?

_Because I want to know if I can trust you._

I did.

_Ok. Good. Ok._

You’re dismissed, Lieutenant.

_Of course, sir._

.

.

(And Jeremy? Don’t you fucking dare ask me a question like that in this office again. Do you understand me?

_Yes sir._

Get out.)

.

.

_(I’m sorry, sir.)_

.

.

In Warsaw, Eames forges a man’s wife based only on a single photograph and the measly details extrapolated from his drugged ramblings in the night.

The mark’s already half-cut when they take him under.

So wild with relief to see his darling, he apologises for forgetting how tall she is and kisses her mouth clean of lipstick. Then he cries into her breasts while she strokes his head, cries himself into a frenzy, until he fucks her on her hands and knees, one fist in her dark hair to slam her head into the floor with every thrust while she sobs and bleeds.

Afterwards, lying heavy over her in bliss, he mutters to her all about the sleeper agent in Bulgaria he needs to go find. How he’ll come back soon, so very, very soon.

Awake again, Eames blinds himself to the looks his teammates give him, shows no interest in their speculation as to how accurately one can imitate the opposite sex.

.

.

(Perfectly, is the answer. Especially after months of intense scrutiny and invasive inspections.  _Mandatory tryouts_ until Robertson and every other man in the unit was satisfied with the quality of the product.)

.

.

It’s two months before Jeremy Howard, with his very brown eyes and very pink mouth, conjures the effort to approach him again.

True to his word, he does so off-base.

A week’s leave and as far as every other American knows, Eames is back in London. But Jeremy Howard, the great Jeremy who will soon be the glorious Arthur, knows better.

Eames is nursing a gin and tonic while glowering across the room when he recognises the lithe frame and stick-out ears of none other than the cocky Lieutenant.

He watches the boy brandish his fake ID with confidence, pressing savvy into the bar and overpaying for a bottle of lager. Then he makes his way directly to Eames’ table with nary a blink.

He sits down as if he’s expected, in all his white shirt, grey slacks glory, his dogtags happily on display.

“What a pleasant surprise,” Eames says. “Young Arthur, without his knights.”

Lieutenant Howard sips his beer, lips pressed too tight against the bottle, pushing his mouth obscenely askew.

“It’s an English legend,” Eames explains.

“I know,” the kid interrupts defensively. “Why am  _I_ Arthur?”

Eames smiles indulgently.

“You look about as much like a Jeremy as I do an Alexander,” Eames scoffs. “And you look about twelve, and all.”

Arthur, the Boy King, the self-righteous prick.

“Hardly,” the not-twelve-year-old sniffs, looking mighty displeased.

“And yet at every turn, you seem to hold all the answers,” Eames points out. “ _Smart-arse_ and otherwise,” he adds as an afterthought.

Young not-King Arthur, with a crown of anger and a sword made of dreams.

“Are you going to teach us how to forge?” he asks hungrily.

Eames licks his lips just to watch the boy’s eyes flit downwards.

“You won’t be any good,” he promises.

.

.

(And he’s right, but he’s also wrong.)

.

.

On the eighth of May, over eight years after Eames answered a call from his wretched, weeping mother, he takes a small team on an operation to Istanbul. Two Italians, a Pole and an American.

“I want eyes on Yasemin Küçük at all times,” he says sternly.

He’s been belligerent for a week and it’s wearing them down.

Dorotka, the mousy, irate Polish chemist, mutters a stream of Russian under her breath that she apparently thinks her team leader doesn’t understand.

“I’ll do more than that if you aren’t careful,” he snarls back at her.

Her blue eyes widen, nostrils flaring, white and pink. She tucks her hair behind her ears with both hands. It’s too short, just falls straight back into her face.

Nick and Vivi, the Italian duo whom everyone pretends not to know are brother and sister, grumble only once they’re out of earshot.

(Eames made it quite clear three days ago he speaks more than enough Italian to recognise their insults.)

Only the American remains, impassive, disappointed.

He follows Eames to the kitchen of the tiny flat they’re going to be cooped up in for at least a fortnight.

Eames ignores him until he can’t anymore.

“What do you want?” he grunts, eyes on the tea brewing in his glass.

From behind him, Arthur sighs.

“What are you so afraid of?” he asks.

Eames doesn’t have the capacity for further anger. He can feel himself spiralling out of control. Purposeless despair is swallowing him whole and it _hurts._  It hurts to think, to dream, to forge.

To look at Arthur, who is becoming Jeremy less and less every day, and know that bad things will befall this boy.

To know he could stop it, if he really tried.

He could get the kid discharged, honourably or otherwise. He could refocus the army’s attentions elsewhere, or maybe Arthur’s. He could hold out his hand right now and the boy would take it, he  _knows_ he would, because he can see the way Arthur looks at him.

But he won’t. Because he’s selfish and because if he saves this one soldier now, what good will it do, really? These past eight years of REM stripping torment will have been for nothing.

“What are you so afraid of?” Arthur asks and Eames, he laughs.

Says, “Nothing, you nosy little shit,” instead of the real answer.

.

.

_(You’re in terrible danger, darling.)_

.

.

In less than a year, Eames will look into Arthur’s eyes and know he, too, is thinking of this exact moment, standing in a sticky sweet kitchen in Istanbul.

He’ll see the deep wells of sadness that are Arthur’s eyes, the pits of his regret that say,  _I know, now. I understand what frightened you so much._

.

.

Before that comes, though, there is Istanbul, an awkward moment over mango tea and baklava, Arthur stammering as he flees the room in humiliation.

There is the incident with Miles Alloy.

.

.

Corporal Miles Alloy is a first-rate soldier and an even better dreamer. It’s an uncommon mix, really, and Eames likes him well enough.

He’s among the first recruits, including the unfathomably clever Ingman and the unreasonably grumpy Howard.

It’s August, and the heat gets to everyone, mild as it remains in Washington.

Eames is going over a file sent by Robertson, containing updates on the new MI6 recruits, including a woman called Polly who forges  _almost_ as well as he does and a man whose name is also Alexander who complains  _almost_ as much as he does.

(Eames doubts either are very likely.)

He’s mid-reply, encoding some information about a new branch of investigation, that the Americans are returning to the idea of manipulating the terrible and desirable idea of  _Limbo,_  when a voice screaming echoes down the corridor.

_“Code Red! Code Red!"_

It’s Ingman, screeching banshee notes of terror, and Eames opens his door at the same time as Colonel Wallace and the newest addition, Major Pfeiffer.

“Alloy’s opened fire on the others,” Ingman pants, blood streaking down his arm in bright rivers that have dripped along the corridor where he ran.

“Jesus,” Wallace stumbles, but Eames is already rushing to the exit, past the bleeding Ingman who lumbers after him.

“He just lost it,” the young man cries, struggling against Eames’ racehorse gallop. “Kept saying we were still dreaming. He got Major Hansen in the chest. I think -”

Eames runs faster than he has done for as long as he can remember.

Every piece of him burns with fear. In his head, all he can hear is Arthur’s voice, embarrassed and quiet, that awful mumble in Istanbul,  _I wouldn’t- of course not - I’m so - fuck - never mind._

His heart pounds and his breaths are ragged. He’s not entirely sure what he’ll do if he reaches the training yard and is confronted with Lieutenant Jeremy Howard’s corpse.

It’s mayhem in the yard. A cacophony of bull bellows, the stench of sweat and copper. Orders barked left and right by Captain Santiago, where he’s pressing his red hands into the right side of the unconscious Major Hansen’s chest. Two soldiers lie immobile, unattended to.

The first, Carolla, his face splattered where the bullet tore through his throat.

The second - Eames’ breath stalls in his throat - is Miles Alloy, his gun still in his loose hand. By the looks of it, he’d planted his last bullet in his own mouth.

Scanning the scant group of shivering soldiers, he sees Arthur, curled against the wall as another man, Sergeant Osmond, helps him pack up a bullet hole in his lower flank.

He’s conscious, at least. He’s awake, roaring in pain, his hands flustering and spasming above his abdomen. The balm of relief that crests over Eames is so strong he almost cries at its soothing effects.

He turns to Ingman, whose eyes are full of tears.

“Come here, lad,” Eames says, reaching for his injured shoulder. “Let’s get you cleaned up.”

.

.

In the turnaround following the psychosis of Miles Alloy, Eames, who has been dutifully playing the role of Captain Alexander Garnett for three years by now, is recalled to British soil.

He’s given two days to sleep off the jetlag and shake any nasty American habits he might have picked up, then he reports to Robertson.

A few months later, he receives a letter from Lieutenant Ullo Ingman, thanking him for all his help.

Tucked into the envelope is another letter.

.

.

_Dolos,_

_They’re sending me to a UN base in Cairo, along with I and O._

_I know what you’re doing. I want to help._

_Yours,_

_Carnus_

.

.

To his dying day, Eames never finds out how Arthur discovered him.

.

.

**(who adores the viper's kiss)**

.

.

“Tell me another,” Alexander pleads.

Abbi Keel, whose heart is soft, her ire an undiscovered periodic element, narrows her eyes.

“I’ve told you them all,” she says.

Stubbornly, Alexander digs out his notebook from under his pillow, skimming the pages until he reaches a list of names. He points to one, and she smiles the secret kind of smile that his mother would give him. It makes him shrink into himself.

“Ah,” she murmurs, settling down again with her arm arched over the boy’s shoulders. “He is the spirit of trickery.

“He created Mendacium, the Falsehood. He was admired even by Prometheus.”

“The fireman?” Alexander asks.

Abbi presses a firm kiss to the crown of his head, the corn curls too long, spilling onto his face. She brushes her fingers through them.

“Exactly,” she whispers. “He was the fireman’s apprentice. He built a copy of Veritas’ statue. Truth. But it had no feet.”

Alexander looks up from his list of names. His eyes are grey, bright, sad, afraid.

“But how did it stand?” he whispers.

The light from his bedside lamp spills over his flushed cheeks. Above their heads, the glow in the dark stars stuck to the ceiling seem to shine brighter at his awe.

“Well,” Abbi whispers. “That’s the point, Alex.

“See, the truth will always stand. But lies, no matter how well they are built, will never last half as long.”

Alex doesn’t believe this. Not for a second.

He has watched his father build lies for years, has seen them stand taller than the truth of his parents’ marriage. He has watched his mother build entire cities of untruths, watched them become inhabited by lots of little truths, impenetrable and vibrant.

He looks down at the name again, tests it in his mouth.

“Do - los,” he states, a good luck charm. Then, “How do you know all these stories?”

Abbi reaches for the switch of the bedside lamp, just below the bulb. Her dark brow creases.

She puts her palm to the little boy’s cheek and he relishes the heat of her hand, the realness of her.

“Stories are good for the soul,” she tells him. “Goodnight, Alex.”

“Goodnight, Abbi,” he mumbles.

The lamp clicks off loudly, plunging them into darkness. The stars above them burn yellow, garish and radioactive.

Just like every night before, Abbi Keel stays until her little houseguest has fallen fast asleep.

.

.

When Eames returns to the daemon of Falsehoods, he does so on a whim.

He picks a name at random even though he knows randomness isn’t compatible with the human brain, that it doesn’t exist where there is sentiment and Eames, he knows sentiment.

He’s cruel and irritable and full of biting anger.

He has never turned the other cheek in his life, no matter how many times his grandmother dragged him to church.

And yet, despite all of this, sentiment clings to the particles of his heart.

It’s cancerous and exhausting, but he’s grown accustomed to it. Perhaps that is why he puts his faith in stories told by a kind stranger to assuage his night time fears.

The first person to hear the name is an arms dealer in Sudan.

He’s a broad-shouldered man in his forties, Akintola, with a permanent half-grin and a scar buried deep into his left eyebrow.

“’ant fataan ghabi, Dolos,” he mutters as he accepts the envelope from Eames, who has dyed his hair chestnut and is bleeding into his shirt from the scar of his newest tattoo.

He sits back, arms crossed over his waist.

Despite the decline in temperature, the humidity is unprecedented. Sweat stripes his back and he can see one of Akintola’s men out of the corner of his eye. He can see the machine gun resting over his lap.

Eames had two knives and a pistol, but they’re all on the floor at Akintola’s feet, now.

He feels itchy, foolish, underprepared and overworked.

“hal ‘ant rajul ghabi?” he asks, matching Akintola’s half-smile.

“ana rajul mutafayil,” the man replies, smoke rough with laughter.

Eames nods, as if to agree, although he isn’t entirely sure if he has the will to put any faith in this foolhardy venture yet.

.

.

He is twenty-two years old.

.

.

_You are a stupid boy, Dolos._

Are you a stupid man?

_I am a hopeful man._

.

.

Eight years later, he takes Akintola’s words as his own, repeats them to an incredulous Arthur.

Arthur doesn’t nod, though.

.

.

 _(Are you happy now, Eames?_ he spits, eyes blazing, lips chapped. There are tears dotting his eyelashes and his shoulders fill his shirt nicely and he’s shaking with violent rage.)

.

.

Ten years later, when Akintola has a knife pressed to the lower lid of his left eye, Eames’ breath hitches at that voice, outside the door.

“la takun ghabiana,” Arthur says.

Then he puts a bullet through the back of Akintola’s head.

.

.

(Before this, though. Before Akintola’s splattered corpse slams down over Eames’ restrained body, shattering the rest of the bones in his partially fractured wrist. Before Miles Alloy shoots five fellow team mates and then himself. There is this.)

.

.

Washington DC is cold and fresh and full of sunlight. Like every city, it rings with traffic at unreasonable hours and it hides an ugly secret.

(Actually, it probably hides a lot of ugly secrets, but there’s only one that Eames cares about right now.)

Eames stands in the workshop.

Before him, four soldiers lie on cots, their arms draping downwards, connected by the misshapen dot-to-dot of the PASIV’s IV lines. The chemist, a fretting Dr Malcolm, sits at a short, overflowing desk, typing clunkily into his beast of a computer.

A knock at the door, the heavy squeal of the handle and hinges.

No matter how many times he gets saluted, it never fails to threaten a pained grin into Eames' expression.

Readily acknowledged by his superior officer, the newcomer turns to the scruffy, red-faced Malcolm.

“Doctor,” he says. “Colonel Wallace needs you. He wanted you to know that Beckett has arrived.”

“Balls!” Malcolm cries, snatching up his notebook and jamming a pencil behind his ear, where it knots itself into his flyaway hair. “You alright here, Garnett?”

No matter how many times he gets called Garnett, Eames always regrets not being allowed the name Bond.

“Absolutely, Doc,” he replies breezily, waggling his fingers goodbye. “The Lieutenant and I will keep guard.”

Malcolm dashes out of the door with all the grace of a walrus ashore.

And then, they are alone.

Alone but for the four unconscious soldiers, at least.

(It's enough.)

“How are you, Arthur?” Eames asks coolly.

Young King Arthur shifts, his eyes flitting up to the security camera in the corner.

“It’s just visual,” Eames reassures him. “No audio.”

“How do you know?” Arthur asks.

Eames raises one eyebrow with exaggerated amusement.

“Oh, I know everything about this place."

Arthur snorts, an unflattering and very young sound. There’s sweat on his upper lip, glistening, and shadows under his eyes.

“How did you get involved in dreamshare?” the boy asks pointedly.

The truth rests on Eames’ tongue like a mint, dissolving quickly into his hot mouth. Then,

“We had some trials when I was a corporal. I proved useful and we developed the training programme.”

“You’re not like the others,” Arthur says, leaping on the tail of Eames’ sentence.

He stands perfectly still over his fellow men, beside his Captain, chest puffed and fists clenched.

“Am I not?”

“No. You don’t treat us like Wallace or Hansen or Santiago. We’re not numbers to you.”

Eames feels his brow crease. Feels the unmistakable but oft-absent tremor of discomfort in his gut.

“You’re not numbers to  _Wallace,"_  he says coolly, as Arthur shifts his weight with unfamiliar unease, eyes on the PASIV. The timer is at seventeen minutes. Eames continues, pressing, “He sang your praises the day I got here. And Ingman’s.”

He points to the unconscious soldier closest to them, white sand hair and fine boned features.

Arthur grimaces, glances at Ingman and winces.

“I’ll bet,” he says.

“What does that mean?”

“Nothing, sir.”

“Drop it,” Eames snaps sharply and Arthur flinches.

Eames turns to the boy, bewildered and saddened by Arthur’s reticence, his jibe. He’s pallid and sweating, with bruised eyes and a weakly set mouth. He’s tall, but he holds himself so badly, as if his spine is being slowly shunted closer to the ground with the weight of his burdens.

Eames has made a point of not thinking about how lovely this boy can be, free of uniforms and the anguish of sleepless dreams. As he looks now, he sees not the charming and confident Arthur, though.

He sees the boy, Jeremy Howard, pasty and horribly young.

“You know you can tell me anything,” Eames says, and he means it.

“You’re a good man,” Arthur replies.

“I’m really not."

Young King Arthur salutes his Captain.

“I need to report to Wallace at sixteen-hundred hours. Goodbye, sir.”

He doesn’t wait to be dismissed before leaving.

It’s probably a good thing, Eames thinks to himself.

He’d have waited all night.

.

.

Three days later, Eames follows him.

Follows him all the way to the end of the world.

.

.

(Follows him all the way to Iran.)

.

.

Looking back, that's where it all started, Eames realises, as he carjacks a godawful Lamborghini and drives out of Milan with breathless dismay, Arthur's phone call rattling through his head in broken fragments. 

_Ton visage est caché._

_Your face is hidden,_ he had promised Arthur, but for the first time, he doesn't think an old gypsy charm gifted to him by his gin-soaked mother will be enough.

.

.

Then again, he is a hopeful man.

.

.

**(it is an unsullied rage)**

.

.


	2. PART TWO

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The soldier.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for your reviews and kudos. Warnings ahead for some unpleasant, slightly more than canon violence and some quite heavy racism from one character in particular.

.

.

The frost of February casts deep, glittering shadows over the city.

Manchester, the not-England one. The one that can’t boast Oasis or The Communist Manifesto.

He shepherds the boy into the hospital via backdoors and the assistance of an easily bought orderly, stays long enough to be told the kid will probably live, and hurries to a hideout two hours away.

There’s a key under the plant pot, just like last time. He scours the house for bugs and, satisfied, gets to work on a new passport.

He works until the ink is too blurred to continue, until he thinks it might be time to check the stitches in his head again.

.

.

**(that carries this silence)**

.

.

In the August of his twenty-seventh year, Eames is recalled to London after the training programme under his care falls apart in a splash of violence that leaves dead bodies and a trail of blood over the hands of everyone at Washington Somna Base.

.

.

The office is unchanged. The heavy oak desk, the predatory aftershave soaked into the plush maroon carpet.

Even Robertson is almost exactly as he was eight years ago, but for the salt specks at his temples and in the roots of his goatee.

“Take a seat, Alexander,” he says with a curt gesture.

He’s the only person that still calls him that.

Eames sits down in the same, sighing hardback chair as he did when he was nineteen years old. He’s bigger now, though. In body and in mind and in ego.

He’s still a little turned on by the ink and the oak and the aftershave, but it isn’t intimidating anymore.

Robertson’s smile is indulgent and toothy as he pours two brandies and Eames is reminded all over again of his first day in Washington.

His stomach does a tiny wriggling flip, like a pancake half stuck to the pan.

“So,” Robertson says, nudging his protégé one glass and scooping up the other with a meaty hand. “What happened?”

Eames could tell him a thousand things.

He could tell him about the US military’s dangerous obsession with Limbo. He could talk about the extraction in Tel Aviv that would have failed if not for Ingman’s lightning reactions, or about how Washington is so clean and filthy and how nice the bars are but only in the right company.

He could talk about the look on Miles Alloy’s face as he lay dead in a pool of his friends’ blood that he spilled.

Instead, he says,

“The esteemed Colonel Wallace saw fit to trust the whimsy of an egotistical chemist over the rest of us. We said the boys needed to keep regular intervals without dreaming, but he insisted he could stabilise their melatonin without help.”

It’s politer than Eames thought it would come out. Robertson grimaces.

 _"General_ Wallace, you mean.”

Eames feels abruptly cold, wretched.

“You’ve got to be joking.”

“Unfortunately not. They promoted him in the turnaround, probably to sweeten the deal a little so he wouldn’t kick off about losing control of the Somna Base.”

Eames’ utter lip curls over his teeth in disgust. He drains his glass in one, nearly shatters it on the desk when he slams it back down.

“I know you’re upset,” Robertson says.

“Upset?” Eames laughs.

He’s  _seething._

“That bastard’s arrogance just got three of his own men killed and even more injured. Fucking military cockwits.”

It’s an absolute luxury being able to speak his mind again. One that Eames intends to make the most of.

“Your mother’s showing, Dalrymple,” Robertson says but Eames ignores the barb, same as always.

“Where am I off to next?” he asks instead.

The look Robertson gives him is eerily familiar from another face; ashy, despairing. Sally Scott in the debating twilight, when the bottles were closed and the windows were open.

“I want you to help train the new recruits.”

What hurts the most is that it  _sounds_ like a request. Everything from his words, his tone, the goddamn resting poise of his  _hands_ oozes sympathy and politeness.

But it’s not an offer. Eames has seen what happens to the people who turn down Robertson.

(Rather, he’s seen what’s left of them.)

This, Eames knows, is what real power looks like, feels like. It doesn’t carry badly concealed weapons, isn’t guarded by heavyset thugs.

It’s a man who pours you brandy, who treats you like a beloved godson and lets you mouth off about your superiors, who compliments you and bolsters you and in the end, will hold your hand as he feeds you to his own dogs.

Eames remains steady, searches his mentor’s face for villainy but just as he expected finds only calm indifference.

It’s never been personal to Robertson.

“Very well,” Eames says, lips tilting in a sly, conspiratorial grin to mask the despair hiding under his tongue. “Got anyone promising?”

Robertson pours another brandy. The slosh of liquor splashing into the glass sings and glugs.

“Don’t know yet,” he replies.

Nausea rolling through him slicker than brandy, Eames knocks back his second drink even quicker than his first.

.

.

“Focus, Hannah!” Robertson roars as Hannah hazes, almost out of focus, almost out of her very skin.

She writhes and screams, the nails buried into her palms like stigmata twist and pull with her movements. Her nakedness is stripped crimson by the serrated edge of his knife and Robertson takes hold of her throat, steadies her with strangling pressure.

Their audience is few, enraptured, sickened. Robertson crunches the nail deeper into her right hand.

She chokes on the blood and bile that surges up out of her.

“Hold!” Robertson bellows and spittle clings to his goatee; his eyes are malice and fire. Hannah yelps and moans, eyes rolling back into her head. Her chalky face wet with red and yellow.

Her eyes lose focus.

Then so does she.

The grim-faced, determined audience blink, afraid, and suddenly lying on the dais before them is a thin, red-haired man with wetland green eyes and a face of stubbled shame.

Robertson, too, has changed.

Alexander Dalrymple drops his knife next to his bloodied pupil, his blue eyes stony and he says,

“What are you going to do now, Borley?”

Borley’s face screws up, teary. He’s covered in piss and blood and vomit.

Eames can feel the man’s pain battering against the fortress that shields his power of empathy. He has paid these dues already. He has taken the pain and the degradation and the violence and he is unparalleled.

He looks at Borley, whimpering like a dog, the recruits who are either repulsed or repulsive.

“As I seem to recall mentioning once or twice before,” he grunts. “Choose the easiest forge to maintain if there’s any chance you’re going to be forced out of it.”

Then he takes his gun and shoots Borley out of his misery.

He’s left standing on the concrete mound. The room is stifling, an underground prison. Eames has little difficulty building those, these days.

He stamps through Borley’s blood to the back wall, where he opens a heavy green door.

“In,” he says, and the other agents, wide eyed with their ferret faces, shuffle quickly into a room alight with mirrors.

Eames leaves them to it.

Distracted by their copies of each other, Eames only needs to leave a few reflections of himself in the mirrors to keep them in line.

Meanwhile, Eames walks back through the pungent abattoir, past Borley’s sprawled corpse and across the slippery dais to another door, white this time and smooth.

It shouldn’t be here.

It swings open far too easily, brushing over asphalt that crackles like twigs in a breeze.

Inside the room is a magnificent horse.

She’s speckled as a thunderstorm, her mane thick and her tail sweeping the floor.

She taps one forefoot and whinnies as Eames approaches. He cups her nose with a bloody palm, smudging crimson into her face as she nuzzles him.

“Hello, old girl,” he whispers, kissing the velvet of her nose.

The grey mare butts her head against him in agreement.

Behind her, another door. She brays against his departure, tries to block his path but he pats her rump, flicks at her tail and apologises until he’s slipped through a yellow door into a cluttered, chattering bar.

It’s golden whisky happy hour. He searches the faces of his projections until he sees them.

At a table in the corner, he sees himself, peacock cool. He sees a slender figure sitting opposite, wearing a white shirt and grey slacks.

“Are you going to teach us how to forge?” Young King Arthur asks.

Eames hears it even over the billowing crowd around them.

“You won’t be any good,” the projection-Eames replies smugly.

.

.

 _(Because I’m not going to teach you the way I learned,_  he doesn’t say, just like last time.)

.

.

**(a brook without water)**

.

.

Eames trains Robertson’s new recruits.

They hate him.

They hate him with such transparency it’s easy to slap the shit out of them, to grind them down to bone marrow and stamp on their entrails. Their hatred keeps him alive.

England sinks into the flooded murk of autumn, bronze and brown, the sky as heavy and bruised as his heart.

Day after day he trains, he researches. He goes on forty-eight-hour missions to places he swore he’d never go to again.

He fucks people in hotel rooms and bathroom cubicles and sticky hell alleys.

It’s draining him, forging faces, forging friendships.

He goes to Madrid to see Esther. She kisses both of his cheeks, pinches them pink and says,

_"Anton, got something for an English penny?”_

He gives her the names of two pro-Franco ambassadors he happens to know are paying off the military to extract secrets from their rival party’s weaker candidates.

He sees Nick and Vivi in Naples, ostensibly renamed Vic and Nini, which makes him roar with laughter and spill his burgundy all over the tablecloth of the restaurant they meet him in.

He recruits them for a job in Mumbai, where Robertson thinks he’s schmoozing an investor but actually he’s extracting the names of all his agents.

It’s takes embarrassingly little effort.

Eames loses weight, loses time, loses his watch at craps, loses four grand at poker. Loses himself in a forge once and spends seventy-two hours afterwards locked in an attic room painting pictures of his own face over and over until he can do it exactly.

Then he gets the letter signed by  _Carnus._

Conning Robertson takes a level of finesse not even Eames is entirely certain he possesses.

The problem is, Eames has already proven himself to be a good teacher and an untrustworthy agent.

“Why would you want to go  _there?"_  Robertson scoffs. “Your ancestral blood calling to you?”

“Maybe,” Eames says.

“Well the answer’s no,” Robertson says. “You can go to Cairo instead. There’s something going on there and I want to know what. The Yanks think they’re so  _good_ at hiding things. We  _invented_ the Secret Service, don't they know?”

Eames puts down his glass of brandy, untouched.

“Lots of ghosts in Egypt, sir,” he says.

“Just stay out of the tombs and you’ll be fine,” Robertson retorts, his voice sharper than his eyes. “Be very careful, Alexander. My man out there will be in touch.”

.

.

Rattling through the underground, Eames slouches, Morden to High Barnet and back again.

He’s twenty-seven years old, hair dyed soft blond and wearing horn-rimmed spectacles.

He takes notes. Mannerisms, speech patterns, facial expressions. He’s intrigued and depressed and alert.

A woman sits opposite him as he passes through Balham, teary, mascara smeared, wearing a man’s coat and by the looks of it not much else beneath.

At Highgate, when still she doesn’t move, he says to her, doleful, “Rough night, hmm?”

She laughs wetly and replies, “I didn’t…”

Then she laughs some more.

He doesn’t find it very funny, then.

He does later, bemused hysteria as he feels it, fireworks in his kneecaps. He thinks about the look on her face, wondering if he should have let her get off that train alone.

.

.

In Cairo, Eames isn’t pretending to be military, so he gets to stay in a flat of his choosing.

He picks an expensive one on a whim, then regrets it because it’s harder to be discreet surrounded by the filthy rich. Plus, he needs to dress nicer, too.

He meets up with Taavi, but the boy has nothing for him.

So, Eames drinks mint tea from his balcony and watches the sun drag itself scorching up into the sky.

He looks at the letter again, greasy with his fingerprints, the folding creases only faint wrinkles now in the cheap paper. Arthur hadn’t made the slightest attempt to disguise his handwriting.

The cramped vowels and too-tall-t’s.

Eames has kept it flat in the middle of a battered copy of  _Live and Let Die._  He’s not sure if Arthur would get the joke.

(Probably not. The boy’s lack of humour is loathsome.)

When the sun disappears, he goes inside. Goes all the way to the flat down the hall that he’s reasonably certain is being inhabited by a drug dealer.

It’s empty, as he knew it would be.

No alarms of any kind, though Eames knows the flat does have one. He upgrades his estimate to dealer  _and_ addict, then goes for the phone sitting innocuously in the lavish living room.

It takes some heavy rerouting that he’s not entirely confident about, but eventually, in his best Mid-Western tone, demands an audience with Lieutenant Howard.

The pause drags like a death rattle.

Eames sits on the ridiculous zebra print armchair, tapping the phone with his thumb.

There’s a big painting of Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics spelling out something truly sacrilegious on the wall opposite.

Eames decides to forgive the addict prick for the eyesore of his furniture choices, and is still chuckling when a voice answers,

_"This is Howard speaking."_

“Are you being listened to?” Eames asks quietly.

_"Yes sir."_

“You’re an idiot, you know.”

_"I know, sir.”_

“You’ve got a meeting with a man called Eysham tomorrow.”

Arthur’s breath is rapid and quiet. He coughs and for a moment Eames thinks they’ve blown it.

_"That’s correct."_

“Don’t go.”

 _“What is - that supposed to mean?”_  Arthur’s tone softens halfway, and Eames wants to reach through the phone and clout him.

“Arthur, what happens with Eysham tomorrow...there’s no coming back from it.”

_"How do you -”_

“It’s my job to know, Arthur, which you bloody well figured out God knows how long ago. Now, if you can meet me tomorrow, I can get you out. But I have a window of time that may as well be thirty seconds for how impossible it will be, so you have to-”

 _“Thanks for the advice, sir,”_  Arthur says, and he sounds harder, colder.

“Arthur-”

_“I’ll take it into consideration.”_

“Listen you little prick-”

_“And to you, sir.”_

The phone call clicks to an end, earthquake through the line.

Eames tosses the phone so hard it shatters.

He stares down at the broken pieces of plastic and wires, feels bizarrely helpless.

He shouldn’t  _care._  It isn’t his job to care.

The only problem is, for half a year whenever his mind has drifted, it has inevitably mangled into one thorny thought. In his head, Arthur’s rabbity voice, hot through the Istanbul air,  _I wouldn’t - of course not - I’m so - fuck - never mind._

And he feels responsible.

No, he  _is_ responsible.

But all he can do is wait.

.

.

 _(Be very careful, Alexander,_ Robertson said.)

.

.

Robertson’s man contacts him after two weeks of mint tea and surveillance.

Neil Vaughn, his name is.

Vaughn is an apex predator in chinos, with blond hair slicked back and a face like a grumpy cobra.

He shakes Eames’ hand too hard, talks too slow, moves too fast. He wears his pride like a cloak and Eames is wary as he sits back in his chair coolly and listens to Vaughn drawl.

“Robertson says you’re the best,” he says, disbelief etched into him like laughter lines. “I’ve got a job you might enjoy. Nothing too strenuous for the likes of you.”

Suddenly, getting to Cairo feels too fucking easy.

Eames lights a cigarette without offering Vaughn one, which is either his first mistake or his fiftieth.

Vaughn’s nose twitches and he clasps his hands.

“Do you mind lending me a few hours of dream time?” he asks, the same way Robertson asks for things, too.

Biting his cigarette a little too hard, the filter crushed in his incisors, Eames asks,

“Do you think you frighten me?”

This is either his second mistake or his hundredth.

Vaughn shakes his head, sniggering.

“I don’t think anything frightens you, son,” he says.

It doesn’t sound like a compliment when he says it. It sounds like a challenge.

(For the first time in years, Eames thinks about the pistol in his father’s hand, the way he waved it in his son’s face and said,  _It’s time, boy.)_

It all sits like lies around Eames, a cartoon cloud.

He gets up and leaves without warning, which, whatever the number, is his final mistake.

.

.

 _Your face is hidden,_  Sally used to say to her son, one hand on his cheek for balance, fumes of juniper and peat.

.

.

Later, to a frightened soldier tasked with intimate violence,  _Ton visage est caché._

Arthur frowns when he hears it.

“What does it mean?” he asks.

Eames laughs cruelly.

“Nothing at all,” he says.

.

.

Nine months before they burn down the HQ of Operation Oneiroi, Arthur and Eames meet in a café on the outskirts of Cairo.

“You look awful,” Eames says as Arthur takes a seat.

The American, who is wearing a thin white t-shirt and black trousers, throws him a sardonic grin.

“And you look just peachy,” he grunts back sulkily.

“Got your letter,” Eames says, waving the paper over the steam of his mint tea.

“You like it?” Arthur asks to a responding chuckle.

“Yeah,  _Carnus._  Takes a certain level of arrogance to-”

“Oh, as opposed to  _Dolos?”_

Eames smirks as he sips his tea, the chatter of the café around them a pleasant hum that matches the air conditioning.

“Bet you had to look it up,” he says.

Arthur first reply is a scowl as he stirs two sugars into his swirling black tea.

“How are you going to do it?” he asks. Eames cocks his head. “You’re going to leak it, obviously. You’ll need some pretty powerful Trojans to break through the firewalls of the government’s servers.”

“Are you making a p-”

“Viral software,” Arthur snaps. “Not actual wooden horses.”

“You know, that was really the Gr-”

“Eames,” Arthur despairs with a sigh.

He looks more than awful, Eames realises. He looks devastated.

There are dark circles of translucent blue around his eyes and he’s thinner than he was two years ago, when Eames got off the plane on his twenty-fifth birthday.

“Wallace got promoted,” he says.

“I heard.”

“Did you know?”

“That they’d promote him?”

“What they’d do,” Arthur corrects impatiently. “What they’d make us do.”

He’s wearing a hopeful expression as he stares across the table, one that fills Eames with unfamiliar, broiling guilt. He knows what Arthur wants to hear, what he’s resting the last remnants of his trust on.

Eames can’t give him what he really wants; what he thinks he needs.

“Yes,” he says. “I knew all along.”

Arthur’s pallid face falls heavily into his waiting palms. He shakes his head and his shoulders follow.

“Arthur,” Eames says, reaches a hand across the table but he’s ignored. “Arthur, I couldn’t risk it. I know - I know you think -”

Arthur mumbles something into the heels of his hands, incoherent and twisted.

“What?”

He pulls back, rubbing the damp from his pink cheeks and clearing his throat loudly.

“I always sort of loved you,” he confesses, wet laughter and crackling shame. “Right from the start. But it was never like that for you.”

Eames withdraws his hand to his own side of the table. The accusation in Arthur’s words isn’t barbed, isn’t thorny. It just is.

“You were barely more than a child, the first time we met,” Eames says without apology.

Arthur’s face splits into a hard laugh.

“Why can’t you trust me to help you?”

By the look on his face, Arthur knows how childlike he sounds as he demands it.

“Because you still look at me like that,” Eames says, knuckles tilted towards his companion. There’s a deeply buried apology this time.

“Like what?”

“Like I have all the answers. Which I don’t, Jeremy. I really don’t.”

“Please don’t call me that,” Arthur chokes out. “Not you. I don’t want to be him anymore. He’s a puppet. A stupid puppet.”

He wipes the sweat from his upper lip with the back of his hand, his face aflutter with twitching upset. Eames licks his lips, tastes salt and mint.

He nods cautiously.

“Arthur,” he says, leaning into the table in his most approachably kind manner. “The truth is, I don’t know how I’m going to leak it, yet.”

Arthur eyes him distrustfully, rims of his eyes as red as his mouth.

“You’re not just saying that to cheer me up, are you?” he asks suspiciously.

Eames swirls his index finger through the bitter dregs of lukewarm tea.

“Want me to read your tea leaves?”

Arthur scoffs, which is exactly the reaction he had hoped for.

“Can you?”

“Supposedly,” Eames says with an apathetic shrug. “My mam came from Romany family. Caused quite the scandal when my father married her. My grandparents would have disowned him if he hadn’t been their only son.”

Arthur sips his tea, eyes bright and full.

“Ton visage est caché,” he says thoughtfully.

“Mind like a steel trap,” Eames chuckles. “Yes, that was all my mother.”

“Your face is hidden,” Arthur translates. “What does it mean?”

Eames leans creaking back in his chair.

“She used to say it when she thought I was lying,” he explains. “Like, I was being deceitful, hiding my true face. But I liked the idea I could conceal myself. Even before dreaming made it more literal, I liked to think my face - well, it belongs only to me.”

Arthur’s face has that self-same vapid quality that Eames recognises from his own reflection.

“You’ve never told anyone that before.”

This time, Eames does laugh. It’s a breathy sound, a little afraid, mostly relieved. Lost in the hubbub of the café.

“I’ve never told anyone that before.”

This seems to satisfy Arthur, who nods and finishes his tea.

There’s a flush in his cheeks that’s almost feverish.

“You’ll need help getting out, if you really want to do this,” Eames warns.

“Osmond,” Arthur says without even pause to consider.

Eames’ eyes narrow. Sergeant Osmond has always been a perfectly decent sort of chap, never particularly standout for reasons good or bad.

A middle man, which in Eames’ opinion is the very worst kind of all.

Adequacy breeds envy, has always been his experience.

“Are you sure?”

Arthur nods with renewed confidence.

“He’ll help. I know he will.”

“Well then,” Eames sighs, defeated by the dedication of Arthur’s trust. “I guess I’ll see you very soon, then,  _Arthur."_

Dropping too much cash on the table, Eames rests his hand heavily for a moment on Arthur’s shoulder as he leaves, feels the heat of him through his t-shirt. Carries it out the front door with him like a good luck charm.

He walks the long way back to his hotel, stopping at a market along the way for no reason other than to argue with a few vendors.

He’s ten metres from the hotel when a sleek black car pulls up along the pavement next to him.

The backdoor swings open. Eames turns.

He’s down before he feels the needle pierce his neck.

.

.

His captors have nothing over him.

No matter the dream they drag him into, no matter the cocktail of drugs they do it with, he brings three things with him. The perfume of mint in the air, heavy rain on the rooftops, and a great grey mare, her coat the splattered shades of thunderstorms, kicking and rearing anxiously.

Bit by bit, though, he can feel his resilience fade.

Then he wakes up.

.

.

(It's all a big mistake, of course. But at least his face remains hidden.)

.

.

“They wanted us to extract your Cairo contacts,” Arthur explains later, gaunt faced and wringing his hands while Eames eats twelve pots of chocolate mousse in a row.

“I don’t have any fucking contacts in Cairo,” Eames croaks between mouthfuls.

Arthur sniffles, crystal smile.

“Yeah, they got it wrong. Your boss is kind of angry.”

Eames laughs despite himself as he scrapes the bottom of a thirteenth pot. There’s nothing personal to Robertson.

If the Americans have cocked up with one of his agents, it just means he can call in more free favours at the drop of a hat. He’ll probably send Eames a fruit basket for his negligence.

(Besides, if Neil Vaughn didn’t orchestrate this whole goddamn shebang, Eames may as well quit right now.)

“I’m sorry,” Arthur whispers. It sounds mangled, hurtful.

He looks at Eames with sad, seal eyes that say  _I know, now, what you were so afraid of, when I asked you the wrong questions in Istanbul._

.

.

**(untouched)**

.

.

So, when Arthur disappears off the face of the Earth, the first place Eames looks is Cairo.

He is ninety percent certain whoever caught up with them won’t have taken him Stateside. There’s no way the Yanks will want to touch this one, he thinks snidely.

When that fails, he tries Istanbul, but it’s nothing more than a crowd of bad-tempered memories.

Arthur, twenty years old, mumbling,  _Did I read this wrong?_

Eames has been piggybacking his demons for years. He’s grown accustomed to their weight, to the clasp of their devilish talons about his throat. It’s been fourteen long years since he met Arthur, and by now he knows the pieces of him better than anybody else.

He goes to Naples, to Manchester, to Johannesburg.

He calls Yusuf and says,

_Hello mate. Remember when you were a drug dealer in Cairo with horrendous taste in furniture and I killed those men who wanted to cut your head off and fuck your bloody skull? Well, I need you to return the favour for me, now._

.

.

Leading bounty hunters to Mombasa was always going to be the easy bit.

Leading the  _right_ ones there would take a little more finesse.

Then there’s the matter of Arthur’s request.

“You want them to find  _Ariadne?"_  Yusuf splutters.

“I’ve got that bit covered,” Eames says dismissively, taking a seat at the cramped, unstable kitchen table and slapping his empty plate expectantly. “I left a couple of easily traceable paper trails from Arthur to her. And everybody short of the bloody Queen knows Arthur and Cobb have been in bed together for years.”

“Euphemistically speaking, of course,” Yusuf says pointedly as he scoops some green beans onto a plate, then drops a misshapen piece of salmon on top.

Eames barks a frantic sound.

“Yeah, whatever,” he says flippantly. “The point is, whoever has Arthur will definitely go for Cobb and Ariadne. They’re good and they know him. The problem is, I’m worried neither will have a good enough incentive to be very  _Team Arthur_ unless we make the pricks holding him seem, well.”

“Dastardly evil-doers?” Yusuf drawls, dumping the pan in the sink and sitting down at his own plate.

“Exactly,” Eames says brightly. He waves a forkful of salmon gratefully at Yusuf. “That’s the spirit!”

“You don’t have much faith in Cobb and Ariadne, do you?” Yusuf asks shrewdly.

Eames chortles a little desperately and pours himself a fifth generous gin and tonic.

“Will you do it?”

Yusuf makes a ticking, reluctant sound.

“Do you absolutely promise I won’t die?”

Eames considers outright lying. In the end he opts for,

“Yusuf, old boy, you should have died in Egypt ten years ago.”

Yusuf swallows his salmon loudly.

“Oh, I suppose so. When are we doing this?”

.

.

It works better than Eames honestly expects it to. He wonders if this is how Arthur would do it, if  _he’d_ been the one taken down first.

He wants to be able to ask when he sees him, but he knows the likelihood of ever having a lucid conversation with Arthur again is less than minimal.

.

.

(It’s been three months since he left Milan.)

.

.

**(by the hand of god)**

.

.

There are gaps in the story of  _them._

There are two years between the first meeting and the second.

Three weeks where Eames was stuck in St. Petersburg with his own imagination.

Three days before he goes to Iran to interrupt a bad mission.

There’s half a year between Washington and Cairo.

And after the deed is done and the chips are spent, ten months of anguish filled with reckless heists on one side and dinners with Mr and Mrs Cobb on the other.

.

.

In Canberra, Australia, beyond the aftermath. When the military is little more than a bad dream and MI6 is a bedtime story to rival Odysseus, Eames carves himself a piece of the world and pretends it belongs to him.

He’s good at fencing art because he’s meticulous and judgemental and he honestly doesn’t care about it.

Art is a lovely, meaningless distraction that the world enjoys but probably doesn’t deserve. He spends thousands of dollars on a studio where he can paint forgeries of European Baroque, like the stuffy paintings in his grandparents’ manor.

He’s a regular patron of a creaky-chair café that serves a different Italian roast every day of the week and seems to only hire twinks and PhD students to do so.

Retirement in Australia had never exactly been his game plan, but he’s making the most of the sweltering heat. He wears stupidly patterned shirts and boardshorts with too many pockets and he goes swimming for leisure, which he hasn’t done since he was seven years old.

His lucky break comes when he sees a passport flag for Arthur Brandon booked to fly to Sydney in the delightfully near future.

Eames gets there first, of course. He scopes out a man called Paul Wilcox who is almost certainly Arthur’s target and thinks, what better way to get Arthur’s attention than to steal a small fortune from his mark?

So, he gets to work.

Crashes on the sofa of a friend, does some sketches for pocket change and makes just-business friends with the sandy smiled, daiquiri drinking Paul Wilcox.

Arthur and his best buddy Dominick get to Sydney on a Saturday.

On the following Monday, they run into the terribly inconvenient con-man  _Mr Eames._

.

.

It happens like so.

.

.

Eames orders an Earl Grey loose leaf tea, so he can make up stories in the dregs. He sips it calmly while reading Stephen King’s  _Misery_ and makes simpering eyes at the barista as he turns each page.

The air con is on full blast, and someone in the back kitchen apparently fancies themselves the next Christina Aguilera.

Out of the corner of his eye he watches a smooth skinned man wearing slightly too formal business wear take a seat near the back of the primary colour room.

This isn’t the first time he’s seen Dominick Cobb in the flesh, but it’s the first time the man’s seeing  _him._

So, Eames makes a bit of a show flirting with the barista as she refreshes his cup, even makes her laugh with his cartoon doodles on his napkins.

Cobb watches it all with quite frankly a bafflingly intense level of scrutiny.

On his fourth tea, mint for old time’s sake, Eames carries his cup straight to a very shocked Cobb’s table.

“Can I help you with something?” he asks shortly, like a man with too much time on his hands, and so spends it practising his facetiousness.

Cobb’s eyes are very light, his face thin and pinched.

“Only,” Eames continues as he takes a seat opposite Cobb. “You’ve been watching me for over an hour.”

He feels a little bad, because Cobb’s skills of surveillance aren’t completely terrible.

(He doesn’t feel  _bad_ per say, but he thinks he would do if it were in his nature to.)

“You’re in business with Paul Wilcox,” Cobb says slowly, sounding exactly like he’s trying to think of each word precisely as he speaks it.

Eames smiles a friendly, expectant smile, helping himself to the amaretti biscuit on Cobb’s plate.

“And?”

“I’m running recon for him,” Cobb says. “He likes to know he can trust his investors.”

Eames doesn’t bother hiding his amusement.

While not the worst liar Eames has ever encountered, Cobb is so obviously a civilian he may as well carry a flashing neon sign, maybe with an  _I PAY MY TAXES_ note taped to his back for good measure.

“Is that so?” Eames asks.

Then he makes an arguably bad decision.

He knows it is a bad decision because he can picture Arthur’s explosive reaction as he does it.

Wiping the crumbs from his hands and licking his lips with a quick snake’s tongue, Eames says,

“Because here  _I_ was under the impression that you were Dominick Cobb, the esteemed dreamshare researcher and part-time extractor.”

The blood drains from Cobb’s face so quickly, Eames is honestly amazed the man doesn’t pass out in his chair.

Cobb stares at him with those wide eyes glittering. Eames can read his panic like a poem etched into his face.

It’s a shame Eames doesn’t really have it in him to enjoy it.

(He can already hear Arthur’s reaction when he finds out what he’s done.)

.

.

_I’ve found somewhere to go._

Where’s that?

_It’s a research lab funded by Stanford University. A couple who have shown promising test results in extraction theory._

What do you need?

_You aren’t going to tell me I’m an idiot?_

Do you want me to?

_Well, no. I guess I just thought you’d try to stop me._

.

.

In Sydney, Cobb offers Eames a job after twelve minutes of dream time.

He’d been distrustful and reluctant, had refused to believe he’d found a bona fide forger that wasn’t a military brat until they were underneath, and he found himself confronted with an exacting, scowling copy of himself.

“How did you learn?” Cobb asks, incredulous over a third bottle of cabernet while Arthur stews in his righteous, snobbish fury.

“If I can forge a Kandinsky on canvas, I see no reason why I can’t forge the man, too,” Eames brags, Bohemia brash and agitated.

Cobb shakes his head, laughing a throaty laugh.

“Mal’s gonna love you,” he promises and Eames tips his wine glass in cheers.

Arthur’s dark eyes follow his hand movements all night, like he expects him to withdraw a gun and shoot them between the eyes if he looks away.

.

.

“Do you think so fucking little of me?” he snarls behind the warehouse while Cobb is on a designing roll and Eames has nipped out for a cigarette. “I thought you quit,” he says, batting the smoke out from between them.

Eames looks at him dolefully.

“I missed you,” he says. “And I was curious.”

“You didn’t miss me,” Arthur retorts haughtily, which is almost true. “You just don’t like me doing things my own way.”

.

.

That bit, unfortunately, is very true.

.

.

Eames hadn’t considered one immensely inconvenient happening.

.

.

He’d thought taking responsibility for Arthur’s well-being would be the most difficult part of the whole job.

In reality, it was letting go of it afterwards that was the hardest part.

.

.

**(who is man without)**

.

.

She opens the door fearlessly, the way she used to turn off the lights when he was a child.

She looks exactly as he remembered, her skin crinkling around her eyes behind her glasses, her plumpish torso wrapped in a brightly coloured woollen cardigan.

“Alex,” she says as if she has spent the last two decades expecting him to return.

“Abbi,” he replies. “I need your help.”

She steps aside to let him in and he sidles past with hunched shoulders, stooping in the low light of the hallway he once drew beanstalks on with crayons at four in the morning when he couldn’t sleep.

He walks straight to the kitchen with all the confidence of a regular visitor, but his eyes are round and lost, staring out of a boy’s face marred with age.

Abbi Keel puts the kettle on, where it starts hissing and humming too loudly in the echo of the kitchen.

“I take it you don’t want juice anymore,” she says, a rumble of fondness in her words as she drops two teabags into a lime green teapot.

“Tea will do fine,” Eames says gratefully.

The kitchen is very clean, a glittery warm mismatch of utensils and cupboards. On the fridge, coloured alphabet letters pinning gas bills and photos in place.

“How’s Rian?”

“Dead,” Abbi says with a choked laugh.

“Shit no,” Eames gasps, rubbing his face. “When?”

“Six years ago,” Abbi replies. “Lung cancer. Never smoked a day in his life.”

She pours the bubbling water into the pot and places it firmly in the middle of the table on a lazy susan already adorned with cups and a plate of rich tea biscuits.

Abbi gives him a look that tells him she can smell the cigarette smoke on him, and a wink that says she doesn’t care.

“What can I do for you, Alex?”

“All these years and you still remember,” Eames says.

It’s discomfiting, he realises, to think that old versions of himself still exist in the minds of others.

“I remember you all,” Abbi says. “Every child that passed through these walls.”

“Or drew on them,” Eames corrects her as he pours the tea.

More uncomfortable, maybe, to think that he is a face among hundreds, bunched into that collective  _Lost Children,_  and Abbi, the miraculous Wendy Darling of Aldgate, still counts them like sheep in her prayers.

“I did a bad thing, Abbi,” Eames says, sounding not in the least bit remorseful.

“What did you do?” she asks.

“I stole some secrets from some important people.”

“Why did you steal them?”

She looks at him with those kind, dark eyes the same way she looked at him when he admitted he’d stolen the sweets from the tin above the toaster.

“Because they were hurting people,” he says. “And I was angry at them.”

“Anger drives us to the edge of our fears,” Abbi says sadly, picking up a biscuit and dunking it in her tea. “Do you regret it?”

“No.”

“Then let’s not worry about what you  _did,_  Alex. What are you going to do now?”

Eames looks over her shoulder at the fridge door, at a photo pinned there by letters  _E_ and  _V_ of Rian holding a stein full of beer, red faced with drink and delight, saluting the camera and wearing a jauntily angled fedora.

“Do you still look after kids?” he asks.

“No,” Abbi replies. “Rian insisted we keep doing it until he couldn’t anymore. After he died, I threw all my efforts into it, but I’m a psychologist now. I help a lot more people, children  _and_ adults. It became too hard to let them go after Rian was gone.”

It’s startlingly honest. Eames squirms in his seat to see her sadness, the exposed truth of it, as if seeing beneath the exoskeleton of her strength.

“No matter how hard you try, of course,” Abbi continues. “You never truly know if you’re helping.”

Eames shrugs, leans an elbow on the table and says,

“What if you  _could_ see it?”

“What do you mean?”

“What if I knew of a way for you to see exactly what was going on in your patients’ heads?”

Abbi’s face is withdrawn, jutting with worry.

“I’d call you a witch,” she says, only half-joking.

Eames laughs in agreement.

“Maybe,” he replies, and he mostly means it.

.

.

He repays her in kind for the stories she gifted him with.

Ones just as ridiculous.

Only true, and terrible, and his own.

.

.

“Abbi told me  _real_ stories at bedtime,” Alexander pouts, sitting stubbornly on top of his covers in his batman pyjamas. “Like Ody’s Seas and Zeus.”

“Those are myths, Alexander,” Auntie Joan says as she rifles through a chest of drawers looking for some more plain night clothes. “They are the exact opposite of real stories. They are incredibly grand lies.”

This is why he likes Auntie Joan.

She talks to him like he’s an adult and she never lets him get away with saying stupid things.

She’s also very pretty for an old person. She has streaky blonde hair and wears the same string of little pearls around her neck no matter what her outfit is. And she wears an engagement ring all the time even though she’s never been married.

She wears shell pink lipstick and fake nails that tickle when she scratches them along her nephew’s face.

She’s snappy today, though. She’s been snappy ever since Mam moved out, months ago.

“Well, Abbi said –”

“For God’s sake, Alexander,” Auntie Joan shouts, her cheeks very red and a curl falling out of her neat yellowish ponytail. “I’m sick of hearing about the woman. You should  _never_ have been sent to stay with anyone who wasn’t family.  _Least_ of all someone like her.”

He doesn’t know what this means.

Someone who told myths?

He thinks about the Keel house, modest and crammed between two others. The rooms weren’t very big and there hadn’t been any paintings on the walls. And Abbi had even hoovered the carpets herself!

And he realises,

“Like a poor person?”

“Like a fucking Jungle Queen,” Auntie Joan growls, pulling out a black t-shirt and pair of jogging bottoms triumphantly. “This is Great bloody Britain, not Africa.”

She turns to see her nephew, head cocked in confusion. She looks abruptly embarrassed by her anger.

It’s a similar expression to the one she used to wear after having an argument with Mam.

“How about the Three Bears? Or George and the Dragon, you always like that one.”

Alexander hops off the bed and starts removing his batman pyjamas reluctantly, all elbows and knees.

“You know,” he says, wrestling the top over his head. “Dragons in China-”

“Oh, shut your trap, Alexander, I’ve had enough!”

He shuts his trap swiftly, snatching the clothes from Auntie Joan and changing in pointed silence.

.

.

(She picks David and Goliath, in the end. Alexander ignores her.)

.

.

By the time Arthur gets to London, Eames has already taught Abbi everything she needs to know about dreamshare.

The PASIV he gifts her with once belonged to MI6 and when he tells her she peels with laughter.

They’re interrupted in their story swapping by a reedy knock at the door.

As he walks down the hall, Eames feels all the moisture in his mouth turn to sand. He straightens the collar of his polo shirt anxiously, runs a hand through his incredibly short hair.

He opens the door with his breath in his throat and his heart in his shoes.

Arthur’s standing on the step, his hands clutching an overstuffed rucksack. He looks peaky, his hair so long it curls around his ears and over his forehead.

The swell of something fierce that rises through Eames at the sight of him is overwhelming. It crests like a coarse ocean wave over him and he’s brimming with nerves.

Arthur’s eyes are narrow with fear and his mouth is a little open. His clothes are ruffled, and his hands look very cold and in a fit of bizarre need Eames wants nothing more than to kiss him, hard, apologetic, desperate.

The moment lingers like a bird in flight, then passes overhead.

“Hello,” he says.

“You left,” Arthur replies. He doesn’t sound particularly upset about it.

“Had some things to take care of,” Eames explains. “Come in, I’ll put some coffee on.”

He takes Arthur’s bag out of his hands and ushers him into the kitchen, where Abbi has just started cooking stew.

She smiles at her new guest then returns to her stove without comment.

“How’s your leg?” Eames asks as he fusses with the cafetière.

“Still attached,” Arthur replies dryly. “No thanks to you.”

Eames turns, affronted. Out of the corner of his eye he sees Abbi grin at the pot she’s seasoning.

“A bit thanks to me, actually,” Eames corrects him. “I did drive you to the hospital.  _And_ I gave you a false identity with stellar insurance, since your country is too screwed up to do normal things like  _heal your sick_.”

Arthur crosses his arms, and for a brief moment he looks seventeen again.

“You left me to rot,” he huffs.

“I had four stolen PASIVs to take care of!” Eames cries. “And a pissed off General Wallace hunting me down. And in case you’ve forgotten, I’d just leaked my own name to every terrorist cell in the northern hemisphere and painted a gigantic target on my head saying  _Bullets Here, Please."_

“That was your decision,” Arthur retorts hotly.

“Yes, yes,” Eames bats him away with one hand and continues spooning coffee grounds into the cafetière. “You’re the one that couldn’t shake off _one lousy tail."_

Arthur doesn’t dignify this with a response.

Instead, Abbi fills the silence before it can snap like stretched elastic, stinging everyone involved.

“Do you like carrots, Arthur?”

Arthur lets out a short chuckle.

“Very much, ma’am,” he says in his politest, most wholesome-American-boy tone.

“Hop to it, Alex,” Abbi says in a mothering order. “Looks like you’re outnumbered.”

“I’m making coffee,” Eames grumbles wryly.

“Did you, or did you not, just teach me how to build Escher’s waterfall?” Abbi asks coolly. Eames sniffs loudly, battling his smile by refusing to look at her. “Then I think cutting up a few carrots won’t be too much of a stretch.”

“I’ll help,” Arthur interrupts.

The stew takes about twice as long as it should do. They don’t eat until almost nine.

It tastes good, though, and Abbi and Arthur seem to like each other well enough.

Eames can feel a piece of himself that was infected and inflamed being soothed by Arthur’s presence.

He stays quiet, lets Arthur explain to Abbi the apple and orange conundrum that Eames taught him five years ago in a lecture theatre in Washington.

Arthur blushes when he catches Eames’ stare.

.

.

(They don’t fuck yet.)

.

.

(That comes later.)

.

.

“Ready to go?” Arthur asks, six in the morning, drinking tea from a West Ham mug that never fails to make Eames’ eyes roll.

They sit on a plump sofa, lit by the tall lamp in the corner of the room and the flickering of the muted TV.

“Yeah,” Eames says. He isn’t particularly ready, but he won’t exactly miss the domesticity, either.

He’s never been a man who enjoys routine.

(In retrospect, military life was a laughable option for a man like Eames.)

Arthur stares about the room, drinking in the homeliness and Eames stares at Arthur. He’s looking healthier than he has done in months. His face is softer, and his shoulders look less army in their squareness.

“Who is she to you?”

The question disarms him. Eames had thought they were going to let it go unasked.

“Hmm?”

“Abbi. I thought maybe she was a nanny, or an Aunt. But not anymore.”

Eames plucks the West Ham mug right out of Arthur’s hand, takes a gulp of tea and hands it back.

“She was a social worker when my parents were divorcing,” he says. “I was the final bargaining chip. So, the court ruled I should be kept by an impartial third party. Abbi and her husband, they chose.

“Of course, my father had all the money in the world to throw at the case so after a couple of weeks I was relocated to his sister’s place. But for two weeks, I was free of all the shit. Tasted happiness for the first time.”

He doesn’t mean to say the last bit, but it’s not exactly ground-breaking news. There had to be a reason he came here at the end of life as he knows it.

He sees Arthur’s expression mask into something solemn, bemused.

“I don’t understand you,” he says through gritted teeth. “You don’t trust anybody. But you’d come to this place, to a woman you knew for two weeks when you were, what, ten? Younger?”

Eames reaches for his tea again, but Arthur pulls back, eyes in demand of an answer.

He shuffles his feet under his thighs for better height as Eames stretches, lion lazy and amused.

“Romany Grace,” he says like he’s cooing to a spooked horse.

“What?” Arthur asks.

“Romany Grace,” Eames repeats, even gentler still. “The reason I  _don’t trust anybody."_

“What did she do?”

Eames scrunches his mouth around a lie that tastes of soot, coats his tongue like honey.

“Nothing at all,” he replies. “We should go, now.”

He heaves himself up, taking Arthur’s mug with him.

He leaves a letter for Abbi on the mantelpiece. Takes a rucksack from her cupboard and leaves a wad of twenties in place of a few of Rian’s old shirts, along with jeans and a bomber jacket.

Arthur fidgets on the underground all the way to Heathrow Terminals, then makes a face at the economy tickets. He mutters,

“Not all of us are so used to first class we find it  _boring,_  Eames.”

Eames laughs, ruffles his thick hair and accepts being smacked away.

They fly economy class to Prague, then take a train to Bratislava.

Arthur reads Octopussy and The Living Daylights with increasing dismay and Eames draws a notebook full of faces of the dead.

.

.

He draws Osmond, hopes Arthur won’t notice.

.

.

 _(H_ is _eyebrows were longer than that,_  he’ll say later, much later. Slouched naked on the bedding poring over notebooks that don’t belong to him, quiet grief a spectre between them, emitting blame and callous fear.)

.

.

Bratislava shelters them for a few weeks.

Eames’ Slovakian is poor, Arthur’s non-existent. They get by with hand gestures and confident smiles.

They have absolutely no idea what’s going on outside the tiny bubble of old town Bratislava. Isolation gnaws on their nerves and their fights, though never long-lasting, are bitter, standing across the living room from each other, frantic and furious as loneliness eats them alive.

“I didn’t ask you to be here!” Eames yells, kicking the coffee table hard enough to shift it in a half turn.

“I didn’t have a  _choice!"_  Arthur roars back, red in the face, bulky in three layers of clothing and gesticulating wildly. “You dumped me in a hospital with a passport and no option other than to follow you halfway around the world! I’ve  _been_ following you since I was a teenager! And now I’m stuck here, in fucking  _Slovakia,_  with no way out but you.

“And I  _hate_ it. I hate it so much, Alex.”

Eames laughs a callous, gravel tone laugh and lights a cigarette, just to do something with his hands other than strangle the man in front of him.

“Well in that case,” he snarls between fissures of smoke. “Maybe I should have left you to Wallace.  _Maybe,"_  he continues, his voice getting louder with every word, “I should have left you back  _home,_ torturing teenagers and shooting their fucking brains out when you’re done with them!”

Arthur’s face falls, pebbles in his mouth and salt in his eyes.

His lips twist in a grimace of betrayal and he wraps his arms around his torso, hunched defensively against the accusation.

Guilt swells like Jonah’s whale between them. Eames’ like a dirty predator lurking under the table, Arthur’s overwhelming him where he stands, swollen by his own horror at himself, at what his hands have done, the blood they’re spotted with.

“You’re an asshole,” Arthur mumbles as Eames takes another drag of his cigarette between mean fingers.

“Yes,” Eames replies shortly. “It shouldn’t have taken you this long to figure that one out.”

He stalks into his bedroom, drops face down onto the bed with his cigarette still clutched in one hand and the door open. He hears the tell-tale clinking of Arthur rummaging in the kitchen, the hitch and pull of his breath in the ensuing silence.

Their limitless worlds have been reduced to this tiny, termite-infested flat. Without any somnacin their PASIVs are scrap heaps of metal taking up space in the living room, tantalisingly close, utterly impotent.

Eames stubs out his cigarette on the headboard, drops the butt on the carpet along with the others.

Anger zings through his veins like acid in his bloodstream, leaving him jumpy and lethargic.

He wants to be far away from himself. He wants to unzip his skin and step out of it, shake off this body bag they closed him in too soon.

He’s at a loss in a way he has never experienced before. He cut himself loose of his marionette strings and the freedom is killing him.

In the come down since the first injection of adrenaline, smashing through virtual and moral government lines to leave muddy footprints on their doorsteps, the meandering sense of fulfilment has poisoned his reason to move, his drive to go on. He’s been left aimless, floating in the vacuous outer-space of exile.

He knows Arthur feels the same, knows he’s still reeling from the shock of Sergeant Brandon Osmond’s untimely and deeply suspicious death, that he blames himself in ways Eames will never convince him not to.

Purposelessness clings to them, and to the spaces that separate them, so easily misread as blame and resentment.

Does Arthur regret plunging into this morally righteous abyss with Eames? Has he condemned a bright, tormented young man to a life unliveable and perilous?

He daren’t ask. So instead he throws cutting jibes like punches in a ring, baring his face for retaliations he’s sure he deserves far more.

In the living room, Arthur turns on the crackling radio. Slovakian news jabbers out, filling the flat with lively, unintelligible chatter.

Eames is reminded of his Auntie Joan, her favourite rosé and Radio Four playing through old speakers on a Sunday.

Itching with frustration, Eames wriggles out of his shirt and jeans, dumping them on the floor with the cigarette butts and burying his face into the pillow.

As night’s dark trickles through the window, the fingers of shadows stretching over the stars, despair creeps over Eames like termites in the wood.

A dread so all-encompassing he can feel it inside his body, so that tears well up behind his eyelids and soak the pillowcase. He shakes, cold sweat and frustration.

Waits for it to end, waits for it to putter out like a candle running out of wax.

.

.

He wakes up briefly in the sauntering dead of night.

There’s a scratchy Afghan rug covering him up to his shoulders.

Something else, too.

A weight over his waist, warm and slightly possessive. Eames turns his head to see the indigo shape of Arthur, asleep, tucked beneath another blanket, curled towards Eames with one arm lying across the middle of his back.

His face is slack in sleep, young and clean and unburdened by the weight of his fears.

Without much thought to it, Eames reaches a hand out to rest his palm over Arthur’s trim waist.

Closes his eyes, gentler this time.

.

.

When he wakes up, Arthur is gone.

.

.

**(mercy, impenetrable)**

.

.


	3. PART THREE

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The choices.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here be violence and monsters. Thank you so bloody much for your reviews and kudos, and for sticking with me. LRCx

.

.

“Eames, this is Ariadne. She’s our new architect,” Cobb says, distracted and pleased.

The girl is petite, a concentrated energy buzzing about her like a cloud full of lightning.

“Hallo,” Eames replies, shaking her hand.

“Eames is a forger,” Cobb starts to explain, which is when Eames stops listening.

Instead his eyes drift across the warehouse to watch Arthur scribbling with delightfully academic ferocity on a pad of lined paper.

He’s wearing his best frown and a rich blue tie that looks in need of a good pull. He hasn’t looked up yet but there’s no way he hasn’t noticed Eames’ entrance.

Cobb, in almost direct opposition to his Point Man, looks possibly worse than he did in Mombasa a couple of weeks ago. The strain of exile has shredded this man’s spirit; Eames recognises his anxious anger and the flex of his jaw as he talks. Eames returns to looking intently at Arthur, if only because it makes Eames feel intrusive, looking at the shipwreck left by the lovely Mallorie’s death.

As if sensing his stare, Arthur looks up from his desk.

His mouth tilts at one corner, the tease of a dimple in his cheek and his eyes softly creased at the corners. He goes back to his notes while Eames holds the smile in his mind’s eye.

(After all, they’ll probably be scratching each other’s eyes out soon enough.)

He doesn’t like Paris much at all; it has too much money and not enough compassion. All his good memories of France involve leaving it, if he’s perfectly honest.

Thinking back, that’s probably why Arthur likes it so bloody much.

Young Ariadne, whose Canadian cadence is quite pleasant, is wittering about level balances and snow circuits, which sounds vaguely ominous.

She carries fire inside her. Eames can see it lighting her up from within.

.

.

 _"Send the architect,"_  Arthur says before he disappears off the face of the earth, ragged with worry and Eames, sun-kissed, freshly fucked by a twenty-year-old photographer, scoffs in disbelief. He hadn’t liked the suggestion the first time, either.

But he sends the architect. He tricks and manipulates and threatens and hurts.

In fact, he sends two architects.

The best, and the one who used to be.

“It takes a particular level of self-righteousness to think you are responsible for righting the wrongs of the world,” Arthur said, years ago.

Eames disagreed at the time, but now, he thinks Arthur had a point.

So, he sends the architect as requested.

Then he waits for her to come back.

.

.

**(this fortified and fearsome light)**

.

.

Three years after Eames shakes the new architect’s hand in a warehouse in Paris, when Arthur is unfindable and vengeance unmentionable, he’s in Munich when he gets a call from Sala.

 _"Isn’t Ariadne Sommerson one of yours?"_  she asks shrewdly.

“Yes,” Eames replies, not quite true, close enough.

(There’s a time for being pedantic and this is not it.)

 _"She sold out Carnus,"_  Sala replies.

Eames’ hand tightens around his mobile.

How does she know that already?

“What?”

 _"I have a friend in Moscow who says_ his  _contact in Interpol has taken down Carnus. And that they had help from Ariadne. Fucking snake in the grass. You know, I worked with her last year."_

A sick feeling of dread rising through Eames, a concentrated dose of adrenaline like snake venom.

He’d known they’d leak her name, really, just like he’d known Sergeant Brandon Osmond wouldn’t be allowed to live ten years ago.

The difference is, this time he’d counted on having the time to interfere.

If Sala’s hearing about it from the Russians, Ariadne’s probably already back in Paris, or at least en-route.

 _Send the architect_ , Arthur had told him and that meant three things.

It meant he trusted Ariadne to be sent inside his head. It also meant that he considered her just about expendable enough to risk getting her executed for high treason by the dog-loyal dream-sharers.

And on top of that, it meant he trusted Eames wouldn’t let that actually happen.

“Who’s Carnus, then?” he asks facetiously.

Sala makes a chuffing hyena sound.

_"Not a clue, of course. But I haven’t heard a peep from Arthur in a while. Have you?”_

She drops the call before he can reply.

.

.

He checks out of his hotel carrying only his rucksack, stuffed with all the things he thought he’d have more time to ready himself with, hails a cab to the airport, pays an arm and a leg to fly to Paris and then jitters the whole way there.

As they take off, he scrunches his fists in his trousers, bites down hard enough on the inside of his cheek to taste blood.

“I believe it’s one in a million,” a voice beside him says.

He turns to look at his neighbour, a woman wearing a plum pantsuit, her auburn hair neatly pinned back out of her face.

“Excuse me?”

“Crashing mid-flight,” she explains. “One in a million chance of happening. You look nervous.”

She’s American, a twang of East Coast in her vowels that’s hidden as politely as the tattoo he can see creeping out from the sleeve of her blazer.

“Just a bit,” he says, shrugging with a dimpled  _What can you do?_ expression.

She offers him a kind, understanding expression and cracks open a can of diet coke. He watches her drink quite shamelessly as a blush creeps up her throat.

Over the tannoy, the Captain chats easily about altitude and the weather. A stewardess walks past offering magazines that they both decline.

“What’s the worst feeling in the world?” Eames asks the woman beside him.

Startled, she makes a garbled sound in her throat.

There are electric blue lines over her top eyelids; her lips have a shimmer of bubblegum pink.

She seems to give the question real thought.

“Loneliness,” she says after a rumbling pause. “The feeling of having nobody.”

Eames nods.

He wonders if she knows that feeling well. There’s no ring on her left hand, not even an outline of one, and unlike most other people in Eames’ experience, she hadn’t checked her phone for messages or sent a quick text before setting it to aeroplane mode.

He wonders if she feels it now, the damp blanket of loneliness.

“And you?” she asks.

“Hmm?”

“What’s the worst feeling in the world?”

She cocks her head, puts her hand on the armrest between them looking concerned, attractively so.

“Guilt,” he replies. Looks over her powdered face for some kind of recognition. “Knowing with every part of you that something is your fault.” He turns to her with unanticipated urgency. “There is somebody responsible for that one in a million plane that crashes. An engineer or a captain or an inspector. They are responsible. Even if there’s nothing they could have done, they still let the people on that crashed plane down.”

The woman’s eyes tighten, light crow’s feet crease her makeup. She takes a sip of her diet coke.

“Who did you let down?” she asks.

Eames looks past her, to the window full of fluffy clouds that swirl like cities of rain.

In his mind’s eye, Yusuf, his blood a thick coat of crimson over the floor. Ariadne getting on a plane to destinations unknown. Cobb, kissing his children goodbye.

Arthur in a shack in Brazil, making his one phone call as he waits for judgement to break down the door.

“A lot of people,” he says.

“And you feel guilty,” she surmises, gentle as a fawn.

“I should do,” Eames replies curiously. “But it’s such an awful feeling,” he adds with a sly half wink.

The woman bites her smile in return. She calls back the stewardess and orders them a vodka and coke each.

They knock their plastic cups together. Eames hisses through the cheap alcohol, orders them two more to sip more slowly this time.

Her name is Carole. She’s forty-two, a legal consultant flying back from meeting with a new client.

She’s lived in Paris for twelve years, ever since she left her fiancé at the altar.

Eames likes her. She’s frank and joyless, with an undeniably solid presence that grounds him thirty-thousand feet in the air.

.

.

They touch down in the mid-afternoon and he immediately receives a text alert.

_GOSFORD AND WYMAN ON JOB IN BRITTANY_

He curses his own misfortune and it takes him half an hour to find out what would probably have taken Arthur ten minutes.

.

.

On the way, he makes one stop at Arthur’s flat. The one nobody else knows about, not even  _Cobb._ He hasn’t been here in over a year and by the looks of it, neither has Arthur. Dust glitters through the air and there are a lot of empty shelves.

But faithful Arthur, Lieutenant to the end of his days, still has a small arsenal stashed beneath the bathroom tiles. Eames helps himself, can hear Arthur berating him for not being more prepared.

“You’ll thank me one day,” he whispers. “You’d better fecking thank me, Arthur.”

Leaves a single euro coin on the tile after he replaces it.

.

.

 _(I’m giving you this for emergencies,_  Arthur said, handing over the double key, looking resentful.)

.

.

 _(This probably counts,_  Eames thinks with glum confidence, stealing back his copy of Moonraker before slipping out into the Parisian sunshine once more.)

.

.

Gosford and Wyman are a troublesome, competent pair of extractors whom Eames has had the par-pleasure of working with on multiple occasions. They are arrogant, wily devils and Eames respects that, but has never had much interest in following them closely.

Yusuf has no further information from him on their whereabouts, but that half an hour that could have been ten minutes leads him to discover that they checked into a hostel east of the river less than two hours ago. He gets a cab, overpays the driver to forget his face and marches straight to the front desk.

“Deux hommes sont arrivés ici aujourd’hui. J’ai besoin de les trouver.”

The flustered desk clerk jabbers a nervous refusal.

Eames clenches his fists on the desk and eyes the security camera in the corner.

The hostel is shabby, retro bohemia posters are scattered across the hall, most likely in the hope its visitors will remember it as a boho-chic and not dreary-drab. There’s not much money here, and the camera looks about ten years out of date.

There’s about a ten percent chance it even works at all. Less that it’s recording right now.

“Deux hommes,” he repeats, handing over a fifty euro note.

The clerk, a young man with dark hair and a reedy expression, green-gold eyes that blink too quickly, licks his lips, casting his gaze at the front door as he takes the money.

“Quatorze,” he mumbles. “Une seule nuit.”

“Merci beaucoup,” Eames says and heads straight up the cold staircase to the right, decorated in colourful wall flowers.

Room Fourteen has a red door, which he does not take as an omen, because unlike his mother he does not believe in omens.

He knocks loudly and to his disdainful surprise the fuckwit that is the soon to be _late_ Andrew Gosford actually opens the door.

Gosford’s eyes widen as he takes in the newcomer, horror lining his open mouth and he tries to slam the door shut but Eames’ foot jams in the gap, forcing it open with a hard shove of both hands.

“Wyman!” Gosford shrieks and a bullet, silenced to a single fizz, cracks the plaster in the wall a little to the right of Eames’ head.

Barely flinching, Eames extracts his own gun from the back of his trousers and cracks Gosford hard in the face with the butt of the pistol twice before burying a bullet of his own in Wyman’s left arm, so that he drops his nasty looking Glock with a yelp.

Gosford scrambles, Wyman bellows like a wounded bull, and Eames can see a bloodstained shirt on the back of the chair, hastily shed.

Tossed on the desk like a trophy lies a pair of women’s underwear.

The vengeance exacted is pitiful and vicious.

Eames' rage of four months, pent up by quick desperation and slowly shattered hope is unleashed and Gosford’s skull cracks under his hands as it splits on the corner of the bedside table.

There’s a second bullet in Wyman’s knee after he managed to get three solid kicks into Eames’ ribs with steel capped boots. Eames sinks a penknife into Gosford’s immobile chest for good measure.

It takes all of eighty seconds.

“Hello Toby,” Eames says quietly as he drops Gosford’s mangled body and takes a seat on the floor next to the squirming Wyman.

“Eames,” Wyman hisses.

He’s missing half of a front tooth and gripping the bullet wound in his left arm fiercely. Blood seeps through anyway in sad little spurts.

“Why are you here?” Eames asks, running a swollen hand through the man’s curly blond hair.

“You know,” Wyman spits. “That bitch took down one of us –”

“One of  _you?"_  Eames spits, offended, and Wyman whimpers. “What have you done to her?”

Wyman’s eyes are red and terrified. He flinches when Eames smacks his face once, though it’s barely a tap, just enough to remind him of his schoolboy days.

“We didn’t –” he says, winces at Eames’ disbelieving expression. “She wasn’t there! We didn’t do anything!”

Eames glances at the desk next to the bed near the window. The silk pants displayed like a victory bell are ripped at one corner, speckled red.

“Then why are you so afraid?” Eames asks.

Wyman’s eyes fall on the knife sticking out of Gosford’s chest. A whine catches in his throat.

“Answer me, Toby. What did you do, when you didn’t find Ariadne at home?”

“Her roommate,” Wyman replies. “She was there.”

“She doesn’t have a roommate, Toby,” Eames replies delicately.

“Well someone was there!” Wyman spits, blood leaking down his chin. Eames’ thumb dips into the outer corner of his eye, pressing just hard enough to be a warning. “A girl! Twenties. Blonde. English.”

“What did you do?” Eames asks again, his thumbnail now touching the orb of Wyman’s eye. A squeal of fear falls out of the man’s throat, bubbles of blood and mucus smeared across his face.

A look of conflicting shame and glee flashes across Wyman’s expression.

Disgust rises through Eames like lightning and before he can withdraw the urge, his thumb jabs hard into the socket of Wyman’s eye.

Wyman screams loud enough to rouse the street outside, hot blood pours over Eames’ hand in a gelatinous burst of nerve endings and he presses his weight over Wyman’s contorting body.

 _"Monsieur! Monsieur!"_  a voice outside yells, open palms smacking against the red door of Room Fourteen.

Eames stands over Wyman as he curls into a ball, limbs twisting around his head.

“Whoever else fancies paying Ariadne Sommerson a visit,” Eames snarls over the man’s cries. “Or any of her friends, for that matter, you feel free to tell them what happens when they cross Dolos. You got that, Toby?”

His one remaining eye is screwed up with pain. He whimpers and wails and Eames wipes his hands on the duvet of the closest bed before exiting the room.

The clerk is standing outside, a mobile phone in his hand, a look of terror cutting deep into his expression.

“You…” he gasps as he trembles.

“Me,” Eames replies, then, “J’ai besoin de vêtements.”

The young man laughs a little hysterically.

Down the corridor, a couple of teenage girls stand in their towels, their wet hair trailing over their shoulders and their eyes saucers in bone white faces.

“Vite!” Eames snaps and the man scurries down the corridor to a cupboard full of boxes of mismatched clothes.

He extracts a pair of light blue denim jeans, a grey t-shirt and a forest green hoodie.

“Parfait,” Eames replies coolly, snatching them up and returning to Room Fourteen.

Casting a glance down the corridor, he sees one of the towel girls holding a mobile, shivering.

Extracting the gun again, he points it directly at the girl, who squeaks in fright. He shakes his head and she drops the phone.

Inside Fourteen, Wyman is moaning, feverishly slipping into shock.

“Fucking cunt!” he yells in Eames’ general direction. “You, fucking  _Dolos!_  You’re supposed to be – be –”

“Yes?” Eames asks brusquely as he undresses, tossing his blood splattered clothes into the bin and dropping a lighter onto them. The flame takes slowly, the acrid burn of polyester.

As he pulls on the new clothes, ill-fitting and smelling of deeply set dust, Wyman begins to heave with sobs.

“Dolos,” he whispers like a made-up word, like a broken promise.

Eames kneels next to the man, neatly avoiding the pools of blood now working their way through the thin grey carpet. Wyman flinches again at his approach.

“I sold out every dreamshare agent in the SAS, just to conceal my identity,” Eames says in a measured voice, one full of the confidence that right or wrong, he is a man who knows exactly what he is doing. “I got good men and women disavowed, just so I could slip through the cracks. Exactly what kind of man did you think Dolos would turn out to be?”

He brushes the scarlet sweat off the man’s forehead, so that he cries out in belligerent fear.

“If anyone else comes after her,” Eames continues gently, mother’s kiss of words. “I’ll take out the other one. Understand?”

Then he leaves, stopping only to pick up the rucksack he dropped outside the red door of Fourteen and to hand the pasty clerk another fifty euro note.

“Bon chance,” he says through gritted teeth, then marches out of the front door.

The sirens wail before he reaches the end of the second street, but he doesn’t bother running. Just tucks his hands into the pockets of his hoodie and makes his way up the slopes towards Menilmontant.

It’s pitiful, really, the tiny price of silence these days.

.

.

**(a window and a door)**

.

.

He gets to Ariadne’s flat a little after seven in the evening. French spring is soft, seen best by the slip slide of twilight.

The security to her building is absolute shit and he’s inside her flat within fifteen minutes. He half expects to run into the police, but it’s desolate inside.

There’s an eeriness to the quiet, a hurting ache in the walls like ghosts.

It’s nicely decorated, Ariadne’s flat. Pastel colours and a couple of pieces of art on the walls. Shelves of books and a nicely stocked collection of pencils and design pads.

Her bedroom is cluttered. At the bottom of the bed, the carpet is stained with burnt red, crusted into the material like paint. It might not be Ariadne’s blood, but Eames feels a trill of cold anxiety in his spine all the same.

He feels Gosford’s skull crunch under his hands again. Pulls out a burner phone he picked up on his way through Menilmontant, swaps the sim cards with nimble fingers and calls one of his London numbers.

_"Everyman’s Taxis, where do you need to go?"_

Eames snickers quietly as he makes his way to Ariadne’s wardrobe, swings it open to reveal a colourful array of cardigans.

“I need a lift to Neverland,” he grunts.

_"Second star to the right?"_

“That’s the one.”

_"What’s happened?"_

Heaving a small suitcase out from under her bed, Eames starts throwing clothes haphazardly into it.

“Gosford and Wyman tried to go Batman on the girl.”

_"She ok?"_

“Right as rain, I think. They fucked up her friend, though.”

(It turns out Ariadne owns a surprisingly lacy collection of underwear and he throws some of them in along with an extra pair of shoes, hopes she isn’t as much of a prude as the cardigans suggest.)

Yusuf curses.

_"Are you hurt?"_

“Nothing too bad,” Eames sighs, pressing his palm briefly against the deep bruises in his side. “Fucker got me in the ribs, though.”

_"You still on for Heathrow?"_

Eames glances at the bedside clock, glaring obnoxiously turquoise.

“She isn’t back yet. Either she hasn't reached Paris or she's at the hospital with her friend. My money's on the latter. Either way, we won’t make the flight. You’ll need to book us another one. Not Paris, it’ll be too late by then. Try Lyon or Poitiers. Some time around three. We’ll be with you early morning.”

He transfers some of the contents of his rucksack into the little case, including a notepad and a passport with a picture that’s three years old of a young woman, her dark brown hair neatly tucked behind her ears and her hazel eyes full of fiery determination.

 _"I look forward to it,"_  Yusuf grumbles. His voice is rusty, still, slurred with painkillers, but Eames remembers the man when he was on smack, remembers his belligerence and his lethargy and his lung spewing self-destruction. A few oxycontins are nothing for his system.  _"Same passports?"_

“No time to change them now,” Eames says regretfully, zipping up the suitcase one-handed and dragging it out to the living room, away from the dried blood and scattered bedsheets. “We’ll just have to risk it.”

They end the call quickly.

Eames dials a second number with Yusuf’s rasping breath still ringing in his ears.

 _"Allo?"_  a sultry voice responds quickly.

“Bella, it’s Jamie,” he croons softly. There’s a groan.

 _"Oh, pig?"_  she says coolly.

“Bella, love,” Eames continues in the same beachy tone. “I’m in the lights. I need a car.”

 _"And I need a man who can find my g-spot,"_ she adds.

"I know exactly where  _that_  is.”

 _"Hmm,"_  Bella replies.  _"Two-thousand euros plus costs. And one of your Matisse forgeries."_

Eames tuts, taking a seat on Ariadne’s plush sofa and staring at the blank TV screen.

“I’ll have to owe you.”

 _"You’ll have to pay me,"_ Bella retorts.

“Leave it somewhere easy,” he tells her anyway. “Text me the location to this number. Where should I pick up the keys?”

Bella huffs loudly. Through the phone, he can hear wet skin and exerted breaths.

“You know,” Eames continues. “It’s awfully impolite to answer the phone when you have another man inside you.”

 _"His tongue isn’t long enough to count,"_  she replies dolefully.  _"Street vendor at Gare du Nord. Tell him Evita sent you."_

Eames rolls his eyes.

“You have awful taste in musicals.”

 _"And men,"_  she corrects him before ending the call.

Carole’s dreaded loneliness envelops him in a breeze of relief. Outside, he can hear the periwinkle lilt of Paris in spring bloom.

His third call is whimsical. He regrets it before the first ring but holds true, reminds himself he owes it.

 _"Hello?"_  a rabbity voice answers.

“It’s Eames,” he says, waits for the tirade.

But it doesn’t come.

Cobb’s breath is loud across the Atlantic.

_"What do you want?"_

“To ask forgiveness on behalf of someone who can’t.”

There’s silence, then a choking, retching sound that cannot possibly be laughter.

It goes on for over a minute. The seconds tick like the belly of the crocodile and Eames listens to a man at his wit’s end claw himself back from the brink.

Two minutes, then a shudder that reaches Eames, and finally,

_"Did Mal know?"_

“About him, yes,” Eames admits ruefully. “Not me, though.”

_"Did anyone know about you?"_

Eames should tell him the truth. He owes the man that much, after getting him dragged away from his children all over again. He should, but he won’t.

Like feeling guilty for the mistakes he’s made or pausing after the twig snaps under his foot. A wasted effort.

“No,” he says. Lies have always leaked out of him easier than truths, anyway. “If it’s any consolation, Arthur almost told you more than once.”

Cobb laughs again, a whisper of anger this time.

_"So, in Sydney -"_

“I was checking up on him.”

_"I thought he just didn’t like you."_

“Oh, he didn’t,” Eames chortles. “Pissed him right off, having me there.”

Cob makes a ticking sound.

Outside, blue lights flash and Eames’ organs are briefly jellified, but they pass immediately by.

_"Are you with Ariadne?"_

“Almost,” he replies.

 _"Good,"_  Cobb sounds genuinely relieved. The apparent care is a welcome change, one Eames hadn’t counted on.  _"Look, Rigby said she’d let us go, but I think Ariadne’s in danger. She doesn’t have the same kind of protection I do over here, and –"_

“Rigby?” Eames interrupts, discards the rest because he knows exactly how much danger Ariadne Sommerson is in. His ribs and knuckles are throbbing with it.

 _"Grace Rigby_ ,” Cobb confirms.  _"You know her?"_

Eames frowns, shaking his head.

“Umm, no,” he says hastily. “Except…”

He casts back, conjures the face of a steely eyed woman, blonde hair and a voice of chalk.

 _"She’s Interpol,"_  Cobb says.  _"I recognised one of her men from – before."_

Eames doesn’t ask for clarification. He lays his head back against the cushions of the sofa.

“I might know her,” Eames concedes. “I assumed Interpol would take the lead. They hunted me down like a fox, the first time.”

It’s more than he meant to give when he dialled Cobb’s number, but a small part of him knows he’s going to run out of chances to tell Cobb what he probably deserves to know.

“I did what I did for good reasons,” he says, hopes Cobb doesn’t think he’s seeking approval, because that’s the last thing he needs from a man who experimented on himself and his wife two rooms away from their young children, leaving them a short walk off a long pier away from orphaned.

_(It takes a special kind of self-righteousness –)_

_"You both did,"_  Cobb agrees, though.  _"They took us to a base in Germany."_

This is probably not true. For all his run ins with the law, it seems Cobb still puts too much faith in a uniform.

A pause, followed by a hesitant voice at half volume.

_"You are going to get him, aren’t you?"_

“I’m taking her to London,” Eames says briskly. “Do us a favour and put out any fires you hear about, yeah?”

 _"Of course,"_  Cobb replies with renewed confidence, as if Eames’ evasion is all he needed.  _"And Eames? Thank you. For what you did."_

Eames ends the call, this time.

His heart is racing and sweat clings to his forehead like blood, sticky and heavy.

He puts the phone back in his pocket, along with his wallet and an extra phone he snuck out of the pocket of a pedestrian on his way up the street.

He sits back on the sofa and waits, catlike patience as night drifts dreamlike over Paris, for Ariadne to return home.

.

.

_If I get caught, will you come for me?_

Of course.

_Really?_

Can’t have you squealing on me, can I?

_Jerk._

S’true, love. And I fully expect you to do the same if I ever get snagged.

_Would you kill me, if you had to?_

No.

_What if you had no other choice? Eames?_

If I kill you, then it was all for nothing.

.

.

By the time Ariadne gets home, night has swollen into angry shades of blue.

Eames stays perfectly still on the sofa, one arm stretched along with back cushions, so he can watch her enter. It takes several fumbles of the locks before she shuffles inside wearing a burden of defeat so heavy, her shoulders seem dislocated in their stoop.

She’s breathless from the walk up the stairs and for a moment, too distracted by her grief to notice him.

The moment she sees him suspends, dust in the rafters. Then she makes a hurt, whining sound in her throat.

“Alex,” she says, and never has his oldest of names sounded so alien as coming out of her mouth. “I knew it was you.”

Even ghostly grey and eaten up with fear she manages to sound vaguely self-righteous.

“You did not,” he replies, amused trepidation in every breath as it burns his ribs.

She rattles around the kitchen like a poltergeist and after a moment the kettle starts to crackle, belly overfull. She retreats to the sofa, sits inches shy of too close.

Her eyes roam his face hungrily. She looks less than her years, mascara smudges on her eyelids from crying and creases in her shirt.

“You look awful,” she says, and he nods instead of laughing because he  _feels_ awful.

He stares at his hands, calloused and bruised by Gosford’s face.

“Ariadne,” he says before he can withdraw the anguish, before he can censor his powers of sympathy. “If I had known Gosford and Wyman were so close...if I’d been there, if I’d known. I’d never have allowed them to…”

He’s glad he doesn’t need to finish, because he finds himself speechless. It feels wrong to tell her he’d have done it differently, because he wouldn’t, not even if they’d killed her friend, not even if they’d killed Ariadne, too.

He still regrets the girl’s suffering, though.

He thinks about the blood stains on the carpet as he sees Ariadne’s expression shift infinitesimally with comprehension.

“Jessie,” she whispers, precious, the way names can be when they mean more than the sum of their syllables. “You knew.”

Defensiveness coils inside Eames like a venomous snake, lashing out.

“I didn’t,” he insists. “I didn’t know. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”

“You knew they would come for me,” she retorts archly. “Other dreamers.”

She’s right and he can’t deny it.

So, he doesn’t. He lets her panic fill the room, dilute itself with reason and gentility. He keeps his patience with her, reminds himself over and over that he needs this woman’s memories, that she needs his reassurance.

.

.

(Yusuf’s text arrives while Ariadne is fiddling with coffee and mugs. She throws one cup over the carpet and calls Arthur his  _psycho_   _boyfriend_  and he doesn’t correct her, which is maybe a mistake.)

.

.

He shepherds her out of her flat a little quicker than he’d planned.

Bella comes through with flying colours, as always. He makes a mental note to send her the code to the container in Marseille currently holding the only actual Matisse he ever got his hands on.

.

.

In the car, driving at high speed out of Paris, Ariadne’s inquisitiveness reminds him too sharply of all the things he buried in his subconscious to survive intact.

.

.

 _(Are you going to teach us how to forge?_ he asked.)

.

.

Apparently, Arthur keeps his secrets in a tomb.

She tells him in from the passenger’s seat while Bella’s car eats up the road and night shifts to pitch violet starshine.

“All this,” she says thoughtfully, mouth full of needles that pierce him tattoo deep. “You don’t do it for money, or revenge.”

 _(Did you know what they’d make us do?_ he asked.)

“Yes, you do,” he snarls back at her, fury barely in check as he speeds towards Poitiers airport.

He senses her disbelief like a second passenger and foolishly he continues.

“Don’t make this into a romance novel, Ariadne. You’ll be sorely disappointed.”

.

.

 _(Do you love me now?_ he asked.)

.

.

She gets a phone call when they’re twenty minutes away.

Gets two words out then chokes up. Cries the rest of the journey.

(Eames doesn’t say a word.)

.

.

Before, earlier, in the beginning of the final landslide:

“I think Ariadne thinks you’re dead,” Eames says as he punctures a straw in an apple juice carton and hands it to a bedbound Yusuf.

Yusuf sips cautiously, eyes narrowed distrustfully.

He has a private room, dirty window, clean floor, a disgruntled nurse with hard hands; not much to say but a lot of eye rolls stocked up.

“Why?”

“I sent her a photo of you before the ambulance got to you,” Eames confesses, unashamedly proud.

“Cobb was on the phone when they got to me,” Yusuf grunts.

Eames refrains from actually clapping.

“I am a  _genius,"_  he says instead.

Yusuf, purpled and puffed up and streaked with bandages, makes a discontented sound in the back of his swollen throat.

“You  _so_ do not get credit for that.”

.

.

All in all, Ariadne’s reaction to Yusuf’s apparent non-demise when he drops her off at the three-bed terrace house in Hackney is surprisingly measured.

There’s only a small amount of shouting  _(Fuck you! Fuck you!)_  and while she probably uses most of her strength as she punches Eames’ chest repeatedly, she has nothing on Toby Wyman’s steel tip boots.

They drink tea in Yusuf’s tattered living room while he bustles about making breakfast for dinner.

“Tell me everything,” he says, and in two and a half hours she recounts every detail of how she broke into Arthur’s mind with Cobb, how she traced the outer rim of his subconscious uninvited.

 _Signposts_ , she calls the illusions left for her, and it’s such an  _Arthur_ phrase to use that it hurts to hear. She’s so bright and vivid, this protégée of the manic extractor and the meticulous point man.

Eames wonders vaguely why he ever doubted her, why he didn’t just call her up himself and say,

_Hallo Ariadne, love, I’m sure you’re very busy with your studies and all, but would you mind awfully getting yourself arrested so you can help me rescue my point man?_

.

.

“We were in a rowing boat,” she tells him as she winds towards the end of her story, hand catching a yawn.

“What was it called?” he asks her.

But she doesn’t know. His fingers tighten hard enough around the pen that it almost snaps.

“You must,” he says but if she ever knew, she can’t remember.

.

.

The rest is pie crusts.

Ariadne recounts a fairy tale of boats and betrayals. The mountain cottage belonging to Ethel and Bertie, with its three storeys hidden and its rooms on display. They’re at a domestic base, repurposed, he figures.

The security is arrogantly lax, and then there’s her encounter with the closest thing to a shade Arthur’s ever carried over into a dream. Sergeant Brandon Osmond, the unenvious middle man who helped cut Arthur loose from the military in a blaze of gunfire and an Afghanistan sandstorm.

“His throat was slit,” Ariadne says of the Sergeant in Arthur’s head.

 _Interpol_ , then, just like Cobb thought.

 _(Cutthroat bastards,_  Arthur said of his superiors, once.)

 _(Oh no, darling,_ Eames had corrected.  _Your army boys are more the type of bash brains in, no subtlety at all. Interpol, though, they’d slit your throat and think nothing of it.)_

.

.

So, Ariadne recounts her tale and by the end, Eames is mostly confident that they’re holding Arthur on private land a little outside of Ljubljana, in one of three distinct buildings.

They’re keeping him lax and under, which is the mistake Neil Vaughn made with Eames back in Cairo.

(Never appreciated that people go mad inside their own heads, left with only hurtful memories to build.)

Ariadne tries to press him about Arthur’s ability to forge, but it’s so basic Eames doesn’t really think it counts as forging at all. He thanks her, gives her a card that will lead her to the services of Abbi Keel, and leaves at first light the next day.

.

.

He still doesn’t know what the rowing boat was called, though, which he thinks will be to his detriment.

(Arthur’s nothing if not a stickler for details, and that would have been an opportunity too great to miss.)

.

.

(There’s power in names, after all. They know that better than anybody.)

.

.

When he leaves Ariadne in Yusuf’s overly attentive, probably obsessive care, he takes a train to Bedford.

From there, he rents a car and drives to his father’s home.

He’s not entirely sure it will still belong to Harry Dalrymple, but when he rings the ornate doorbell, he’s answered by a mousy housekeeper whose watery blue eyes flash with recognition.

Eames allows himself to be led to the library, where he used to spend his days dog-earing random pages of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, just to merit a telling off.

Harry Dalrymple is greyer, more lined and otherwise unchanged. Eames has never appreciated how many of his father’s genes he’s been wearing for the past thirty-eight years until this very moment.

Harry looks at him through rectangular spectacles perched on his nose. He stands up behind his desk with an abruptness that suggests shock, an expression that speaks of horror.

“You’re not dead,” he says, voice rusty and deep, the exact pitch of Eames’ long forgotten memories.

“Not yet,” Eames replies.

“Alexander,” Harry begins but Eames cuts his father off.

“There is nothing you can do that will change what you did to me,” he says in the measured, practised cadence of a speech prepared years ago. “Whatever shame you felt at having a gypsy’s son, I hope you were able to rid yourself of it by leaving me to rot in the army’s hands.”

On the desk, tilted just so for the lamplight to halo it, a photograph of a pretty woman not much older than Eames is now, a boy of perhaps ten on one side and a sullen teenage girl who bears a surprisingly strong resemblance to Eames on the other.

“I hope you found peace,” he says with disdain and even a small measure of truth.

“They told me you were dead,” Harry says blankly.

Eames moves closer, stands directly at the other side of the desk opposite his father, in the library that still smells of woodsmoke and lilies.

“They told me there was a security breach,” Harry continues. “That Robertson had to cut loose all his agents after they were compromised.”

Eames sighs impatiently.

“The breach  _was_ me,” he says irritably. “And it doesn’t matter if you want to call Robertson and tell him, you’re a decade too late for that. I need something from you.”

Harry Dalrymple rises to his fullest height, barely an inch above his son’s.

“Oh?” he asks.

“I need to get to Slovenia. And I need to get out again with a second person. I could probably get in undetected, but the security crawling over the mainland by the time I get out will be insurmountable. Unless you help.”

Harry Dalrymple wrestles visibly with a retort.

Eames smirks at his father like he’s thirteen again, and the resentment tastes the same, as potent as aniseed in his teeth.

He doesn’t even know if the housekeeper is still behind him.

He almost hopes so.

“I can’t make you help me,” Eames says, which isn’t exactly true. But short of putting a gun to one of the half-siblings he didn’t know existed until this very moment, he hasn’t got many options. “I’m appealing to a better nature that I hope still exists. All evidence to the contrary.”

Eames built this house under a PASIV, once.

Every room, fireplace, painting, door handle exactly as it was. But try as he might, he couldn’t populate it. The projection of his father had always eluded him, leaving him restive, dissatisfied.

Now, in this stifling and populated house, Harry Dalrymple looks at his son with weak defiance.

“I didn’t know what else to do with you,” he says. “I tried not to hate you, you know.”

Eames has no platitudes to offer his father’s broken moral compass. He came to terms with his latent daddy issues a long time ago.

“Someone needs my help,” he says, instead. “Someone who means a great deal to me.”

Harry glances behind his son, then at his desk.

“I don’t ever want to see you again, if I do this for you,” he whispers.

“That is an entirely mutual feeling,” Eames replies.

Harry’s eyes are green in the low light, but Eames knows them to be grey.

His nod, a furtive jerk of his chin, loosens something in Eames’ chest, a knot between his lungs he had forgotten to untie.

.

.

Despite his father’s wealth and influence, it still takes three days to get Eames across the channel and into Slovenia.

He wonders if Lord Dalrymple will lie to the MI6 officials when they come sniffing, an inevitability if Ariadne really did let slip his name to Interpol.

.

.

He’s sure he’ll find out soon enough.

.

.

**(towards unknowable promises)**

.

.

Eames clicks the big red button on military dreamshare on New Year’s Day.

If he had indulged to the extreme of his theatricality, he’d have done it on the stroke of midnight, but that would have taken a bit too much planning. And in any case, stroke of what midnight?

London? Washington, Paris, Johannesburg?

Arthur is in Kabul, wearing a uniform he doesn’t belong to anymore, on an operation he won’t see the completion of.

Eames is in Venezuela. Maracaibo, to be precise. He’s in a hotel booked under the name Adam Dolos, which is recklessness and defiance in equal measure.

He sends the data to a list of names compiled over a seven-year period.

(Among them, the names Stephen Miles, Mallorie Cobb, Dominick Cobb. But he won’t remember that.)

He leaves behind a signature, like grubby fingerprints on a pane of glass.

All rivers reach the sea, his mam taught him.

All trails lead to Dolos and Carnus, his seven-year list of names will learn, too.

With it, they’ll learn all about how Great Britain carved out its forgers on racks inside their own heads; how somnacin overdoses lead to psychotic breaks and mass murders; how the XO47 PASIV model was designed off the experimental backs of the brightest, loneliest teenagers that the US government could get their hands on.

He sends it in a flurry of fingertips.

Then he shuts the laptop, opens the PASIV. Lies back and sinks into a dreamful sleep.

.

.

He dreams about the things he cannot change.

.

.

“Getting a little tetchy, hmm?” Young King Arthur asks.

He’s wearing a tank top and light blue shirt, soft trousers. His dogtags dull silver against the burnt pink of his skin.

Sweat clings to his face, his throat. His hair is damp, and his mouth is red, and he has that sly, gleeful look on his face that only serves to make Eames feel every bit as old as he is.

“You made Dorotka cry,” Arthur continues, mixing some more mango tea and joining Eames at the table. He drops a thin white box between them, grease marks, slightly warm.

Inside, fat triangles of baklava oozing syrup and pistachio, all the sweet sins of the world.

“She’s a big girl,” Eames says dryly, helping himself to a piece. It drips down his fingers, almost melts completely apart in his hands. “Who’s on Küçük?”

“Vivi,” Arthur replies, sipping his tea neatly and crossing his legs. “You seem a bit cabin feverish.”

“Do I?” Eames asks. Takes a bite of baklava and expends every effort not to groan.

He hasn’t eaten in over sixteen hours.

“It’s making the rest of us quite nervous,” Arthur admits, nodding solemnly. “Is there something about this mission we should know?”

He’s leaning forward, like he does in the bar back in Washington, where they are not Captain Garnett and Lieutenant Howard but, rather, Alex and Arthur. The kitchen is small, and Istanbul is already very hot, even for May.

The skin on the bridge of Arthur’s nose is cracked and his forearms are tanned golden.

Eames leans casually back in his chair.

“Don’t worry your little head about it, Arthur,” he says just to enjoy the flash of anger that takes hold of the younger man.

“You can trust me, you know,” Arthur says earnestly. “I can keep a secret.”

By now, he’s leaning just close enough that their knees brush. It’s impossible to pretend not to notice, or, as Eames quickly learns, to intentionally mistake its lack of innocence.

There is intent in that brush, a coy physical underscore to the younger man’s trustworthiness.

It’s as if he’s saying,

 _Look how well I hide this,_  like it wasn’t glaringly obvious what a pillow biter he was right from the day Eames set eyes on him.

Eames looks at the young, eager face in front of him. He thinks about Iran, two months ago, Arthur’s shock as he burst into tears at the sight of Eames in the barracks. How he’d cried like a toddler who’d forgotten how to stop, until he was crying just for the sake of it.

Now, here, in Istanbul, Arthur isn’t crying.

There’s direct focus in his eyes, a need and a want.

Arthur puts a hand on Eames’ leg, grip solid but not tight, just above his knee and right below his thigh.

“Eames, you know –”

The warning bells clang in minor scales and Eames brushes away his hand, even nudges his chair back just to make his point.

“Arthur,” he says in a voice that is supposed to be apologetic but maybe he got it wrong because Arthur withdraws like he’s been scalded.

His mouth is downturned, now, dragging at the length of his face, until it’s a crimson mask of dismay.

“Did I read this wrong?” he asks, visibly regrets  _that_ one because with feet digging into the floor, he pushes his own chair away. The scrape of wood over lino is painfully loud.

It should be enough but Eames, he isn’t a man of half-measures. Embarrassment gives way to hostility and before he can shut his traitorous trap, he says,

“Your military have particularly strong ideas, Lieutenant, and as your senior officer I can’t be –”

“I wouldn’t,” Arthur gasps. He’s blushing so badly it’s blended into his sunburn now. Tears of humiliation glisten in his eyes and he sounds drunk in his rush to find the right words. “Of course not – I’m so – fuck – never mind.”

He flees the room so fast, the door bounces on the frame as he swings it shut behind him.

A few seconds later, the front door slams, too.

Eames drops his head into his hands and swears very loudly.

Shame swallows him down.

He stays like that, hunched stiff, muscles locked, until Nick returns, helping himself to a piece of baklava and singing his Captain’s praises for buying some more so soon.

“It was Arthur,” Eames spits, shaking off a horrid sense of regret; leaves the room to go find Dorotka and apologise for shouting at her again yesterday.

.

.

It’s not until that night, when he’s staking out Yasemin Küçük’s father’s house, that he realises he forgot to call Arthur by his real name.

Nick never questions it, though.

.

.

It’s only later, in Naples, between the vinaigrette argument and planning how to break into Lars Nedderman’s mind, that Nick brings it up at all.

.

.

(And does your  _Arthur_ know about this devious plan of yours?)

.

.

(Of course, he’s not  _Eames'_  Arthur, then. Not anymore. Not yet.)

.

.

So, on the first of January, after he’s betrayed his Queen and Country, plugged himself into a PASIV and laid down to sleep, Eames builds a farmhouse like the one his mother moved to after she left.

It’s dilapidated and drafty, but it always suited her, strange ornate fireplaces, a deep pantry and a haunted attic.

Eames rebuilds it from memory, which some people say is dangerous, but Eames isn’t an architect, so what do they expect? All he has is memories.

He builds the farmhouse and drifts through in the shape of his younger self, where the wall marks are labelled  _DALLY 13 YEARS OLD._

He finds himself in the master bedroom, with the ensuite bathroom that smells of primrose and soap.

He looks at himself in the free-standing body mirror, scarves draped over the sides and a note in smeared purple lipstick at the bottom.

 _Ná déan dearmad,_ it says.

English is his mother-tongue, French and German are his schoolboy tricks, Russian is his father’s demand, but it’s Irish he adopted for himself.

Vengeance against a mother who never learned true Romany, against a father who forbade him from speaking in pikey tongues.

He looks at himself, wiry, tanned, bloodshot eyes and a split lip; hair slicked back off his face with gel that’s crusted his head into a wet helmet.

In the dream, he is faceless, just like he always wanted to be at this age.

Perhaps it was that wish that doomed him.

The first time he ever changed his face in the dream, he was twenty years old.

Somnacin was closer to a sedative, then. The dreams were foggy and took so much effort to sustain in any meaningful detail that more often than not, ten minutes of topside time required sleeping off for an hour or so. That or risk a migraine that would knock you out for days.

Now, Eames can dream for weeks.

It’s almost frightening, the ease with which he sinks into this lucid, omniscient world.

In the mirror, he watches himself grow in rapid time, feels the strain of his shirt over the balls of his rounded shoulders. His hair spills out over his ears, breaking free of its mould and curling over his forehead.

His jaw thickens, his chest broadens, his belly swells. He’s soft and muscular and the tattoos prickle over him like a swarm of ants gnawing at his skin.

He’s accumulated these charred scars to map himself, to remember all the pieces that make him, the parts of which  _Eames_ is the sum. To cover up the stitched dirt of bad jobs.

He doesn’t know a single forger without ink.

(And Eames, he knows all the forgers worth knowing.)

“What will you do now?” a voice behind him asks.

It’s only a projection, but the sight of Robertson sitting at his mother’s opal dresser is disturbing, a violation and a threat.

He is as he was the day Eames met him: oiled and sleek and predatory.

“I’ll run until they stop chasing me,” Eames says simply, plucking a tie from amongst his mother’s muslin scarves and tying it, double windsor.

“You’re a traitor,” Robertson hisses, disgust like bile caught in his throat. Eames slips on a holster, unlatched.

“So are you,” Eames replies calmly.

The projection of Robertson rises. There’s a knife in his hand but he won’t use it. Eames may be self-destructive, but not even his subconscious is that treacherous.

“I made you what you are,” Robertson says.

He said that in real life, once. Eames  _thanked_ him at the time, but he doesn’t now. This time, he extracts the gun from his shoulder holster, locks the barrel with a strong thumb.

He smiles, grimly incautious.

“You made me hate and fear myself enough that turning into other people became easier than being me,” he replies. “And you can’t even take all the credit for that.”

He tucks the tie into his shirt collar with one hand, snug against his Adam’s apple.

Shooting the projection of Robertson doesn’t feel as cathartic as he’d hoped it would. Robertson’s body crumples the same as every other one Eames has planted bullets in like weeds, and Eames is left with a cold douse of apathy.

He steps over the body, dashes downstairs on quick, creaking feet and out into the garden behind.

In the yard, the grey mare whinnies loudly, stamps her feet and tosses her head back. Her saddle is too tight, biting into her sides.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he murmurs and, true to his name, becalms the wintry horse with gentle hands and a low, soothing tone.

His fingers thread through her mane and he unclips her saddle.

As her head butts against him, though, he pulls his hands away to find them wet with blood. She brays nervously, more blood spilling down her neck in deep rivers, red rain through the clouds of her coat.

“Sorry, sweetheart,” he says as she stamps and snorts.

Her saddle slips down into the mud.

Pulling his gun from his holster again, he nuzzles it into the swell behind her ear and shoots once.

She staggers and crumples no different from Robertson, almost takes Eames down with her bulk.

He lifts the gun to the soft palate inside his mouth.

.

.

Of the three of them, he’s pleased to discover, shooting himself is no longer the easiest of the lot.

.

.

**(salvaged)**

.

.

Maracaibo shelters Eames for two days. He ingratiates himself with fumbling Spanish into a poker game, cleans out the house then spends all his winnings on buying everyone drinks.

Friendships built on gambling and liquor make up the bulk of Eames’ acquaintances by now.

He is drunk for seventeen hours, has sex with three different partners and gets into a fight with a man over a brand of cigarettes he’s never even heard of.

He smokes like a chimney, is surprised that he doesn’t throw up tar along with the tequila when he finally falls face first into the bathtub of his own hotel room, alone at last.

Halfway around the world, Arthur prepares to vacate Kabul, the camp of sandy-kicked soccer and machine guns hidden at the bottom of bread baskets.

If he tries to contact Eames, well, Eames never gets the message.

Eames travels by car all the way to Medellín, a winding, bloodthirsty journey, mosquitos and reptiles.

He is utterly out of contact with the rest of the world for the first time since he turned eighteen.

It’s refreshing and frightening and he likes to think that he could live like this forever, free of scrutiny, free of technology, free of dreamshare.

.

.

(He couldn’t, of course. He is a social creature. He’d die of exposure left without the soft padding of humanity to buffer him. A city boy of solitude.)

.

.

He gets to Cambodia in close to a week, minimal damage but a close call in China that leaves him breathless and about a pint short of O negative.

It welcomes him, candle sticky and dirt poor, same as the last time. His passport says his name is  _Alasdair Macfarlane._  His Scottish accent is strictly Highland, and his clan knowledge is partially fictionalised, but he likes being Alasdair Macfarlane.

Al is a government official recently made redundant, taking some much-needed time off to travel the world, which he didn’t do as a stroppy teenager.

Not married, no children, not yet scraping thirty, he is attractive and brash and terrible at cards. He checks into his hotel in Phnom Penh.

After a lengthy flirtation with the clerk, a twenty-one-year-old American girl on her third gap year,  _Angela,_  he falls into his room. Stops only to lock up his briefcase in the safe.

“You had a phone call this morning,” Angela had said. “A man called Lance. It sounded quite urgent, but he didn’t want to leave a message.”

Eames picks up the hotel phone, dials out to overseas  _(yes, on the credit card please, Angela)_  and a harried voice answers,

_"Eames?"_

“I’m looking for a Mr Lancelot,” he says, practically purring with joy to hear that voice, angry cat-hiss and alive.

 _"You missed your Hong Kong check-in,"_  Arthur says, sounding harassed.

“Yes, sorry love, but see, running from the SAS is a little unpredictable.”

_"Are you safe?"_

“Of course I am. Heard you’re dead though. Ever so sorry, old chap.”

 _"I'll get over it,"_  Arthur replies, which is about as close to a joke as Eames thinks he’s ever heard him make.  _"Are we still meeting at Jeremiah Lodge?"_

“My flight gets in at midday,” Eames confirms, stretching his legs out along the bed with his shoes on.

The bathroom light hums like insects, the radiator is on too high and the entire room smells of men’s body wash. Eames sinks his head into the pillow and rubs the grit from his eyes.

“I saw some crocodiles in Venezuela, you know,” he says through a yawn. “Very endangered, apparently. My faithful tour guide shot one for me.”

 _"Of course,"_  Arthur says with a deep, abiding sigh.  _"I assume you got some actual work done amongst your sightseeing adventures?"_

If Eames ever achieves inception, he thinks to himself, it will be to implant a sense of whimsy into this turgidly serious, immovable-object of a man.

“I’ll tell you all about it over dinner when I see you,” he replies instead.

 _"Don’t be late,"_  Arthur says.

“I won’t,” Eames promises, but Arthur’s already dropped the call.

.

.

“I had a plan, you know,” Arthur tells him later, years later.

He runs his finger faintly up and down Eames’ spine, his back a flurry of gooseflesh tattoos.

“Mmph?” he grunts sleepily into the pillow.

“You would walk into the house and I would just kiss you. Until you stopped feeling guilty or wrong or whatever it was that stopped you before.”

His voice full of bravado that belies how foolish he finds his younger self.

Eames grins, shark mouth, shifts his hips. Arthur’s hand slides lower, circling his coccyx.

“Maybe I just wasn’t attracted to you before,” he mumbles.

Arthur’s hand, patterning the fault lines in Eames’ skin. Confident and shy, this paradox of a boy, who isn’t a boy anymore.

“Yes, you were,” Arthur replies.

.

.

(He’s not wrong.)

.

.

The reason this hopelessly romantic plan did not come to fruition is because something else happens first.

Something that just so happens to be one of the very few things Eames would have happily gambled his life on.

Successfully wiping his fingerprints from the leaked files? A prayer at best.

Evading the capture of the SAS, CIA  _and_ alerted terrorist cells? A snowball rolling through the slopes of hell.

Arthur getting out of Afghanistan at all undetected? Snake eyes on a full moon.

Them both reaching New Zealand unharmed? Miraculous.

But one thing was almost certain.

Sergeant Brandon Osmond being killed off in the aftermath of Arthur’s departure?

Eames saw it coming from miles away,  _months_ away. From the moment Arthur suggested him as an accomplice, back in Cairo almost an entire year before, Eames understood what Arthur was really saying, even though he didn’t know it himself.

 _Osmond will help,_  he said, not knowing what he meant was:  _Osmond will throw himself on a metaphorical grenade, then a literal one, too._

.

.

It comes to light too soon.

.

.

It comes to light like this.

.

.

Eames’ plane touches down in Wellington International Airport at 12:16PM and within two hours he’s at the cottage being rented under the name Jeremiah Michaels.

Inside, Young King Arthur. His eyes swollen bloodshot. His face pouchy with sadness.

His mouth wobbling a loose sound that is the closest thing to a wail Eames has ever heard from someone older than six.

“They killed him,” he says, a rolling range of cluttered syllables that Eames decodes instantly.

He’s sitting against the headboard of the bed, having chosen the west facing the bedroom, decorated in cool shades of green and white.

Eames perches on the bed, a hand’s breadth from Arthur’s feet.

“I’m sorry,” he says and is surprised to find he means it.

Arthur hides his face in his hands again, trying to stifle his sobs. His hair’s a bird’s nest of curls.

Eames wonders with none too small a measure of narcissism if Arthur is one of those rare types of people who can love more than one person at once.

(It’s less common than the world and all its inhabitants would like to believe, as Eames has discovered. Or perhaps he is simply careless.)

“How did you find out?” Eames asks.

Arthur lashes out, rapid wild cat.

His hands swing, a corner of a knuckle catching Eames’ chin, fingers taking hold of his shirt collar to wrench and rattle him.

“Arthur, Arthur, stop,” he says calmly, harshly, taking Arthur’s bird bone wrists in his hands to hold him steady in the rocky tide of his over-spilling emotions. It’s easy to twist out of his grip.

God knows how long Arthur’s been sitting here, in the quicksand of despair, alone.

“He’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead,” Arthur says in the voice of a man who’s never lost anyone before.

The voice of a man who’s never  _had_ anyone to lose before.

Eames doesn’t say anything. He knows better than to try assuaging the younger man with meaningless platitudes.

He holds Arthur’s wrists tight enough to bruise, until he stops struggling, runs out of breath and tears. It’s a slow, hitching descent into silence. Arthur sniffles and shuffles, never fully removing himself from Eames’ hold.

His throat catches most of his sighs before they can fall out of him.

Eames waits with a patience only dreamsharers can fully cultivate. He idly wonders with benign selfishness whether  _his_ death would merit such a reaction, too.

The round face of the clock on the wall ticks slowly towards three o’clock. He’s tripped over so many time zones in the past week, he has absolutely no idea whether he’s jetlagged or not.

All he knows is that isn’t tired, not at all.

He’s buoyed by the relief of what he has done, by the vengeance he has mastered and the astonishment that he hasn’t been gunned down yet.

Arthur, however, looks like he’s got a firm grip on the handle of death’s door.

He’s drawn, expression pinched, no doubt from dehydration. His eyes are glazed.

“Are you injured?” Eames asks.

Arthur blinks. His gaze slides out of focus as he searches Eames’ expression.

Looking for what, Eames couldn’t guess.

“No,” he says after a minute.

“Ok then,” Eames says, and he sets about tugging a heavy sheepskin throw over the younger man.

He tries to protest, but Eames’ hands are firm commands.

Arthur might have shed his uniform but he’s still a soldier. He goes down with only a little force, closes his eyes and holds tight to Eames’ left hand as exhaustion takes him.

“You won’t, will you?” he mumbles, voicing half of a silent conversation Eames hadn’t realised they were having.

Arthur’s hands are clammy around his own. His face nudges against Eames’ knuckles like a dog vying for attention.

Eames sits back down on the bed, closer to Arthur this time.

He doesn’t reply, though it seems Arthur doesn’t need one. He sleeps fast and deep.

.

.

(He sleeps like the dead.)

.

.

On his twenty-fifth birthday, Eames is in Washington DC.

(A month ago, he had an argument with Robertson about somnacin dosages.)

He introduces himself to a group of stuck up soldiers as Captain Alexander Garnett. He gets a lot of truculent expressions for his troubles; comes very close to committing multiple acts of treason in his first three hours.

.

.

On his twenty-eighth birthday, Eames is in Cape Town, South Africa.

(A month ago, he leaked every secret he’d ever stolen.)

He drinks imported rum at an outdoor bar, listens in on an interesting conversation between two spitting men about blood diamonds that on another day he might have intruded upon, and draws little pictures of the Stations of the Cross on the backs of postcards he’s collected over the course of his month in exile.

He’s found religion in his post-MI6 world.

Not God, of course. He’s not interested in finding _Him._

Nevertheless, even as a boy, he always rather liked the story of the crucifixion.

As he sculpts the bearded lamenting face of Simon of Cyrene, his phone buzzes angrily in his back pocket.

It rings out and he sips his rum lazily. It rings again almost immediately.

(There’s only one person with this number.)

The third time it rings, he extracts it, puts it to his ear, and snaps,

“I’m busy.”

 _"What if I was in trouble?"_  a twittering Arthur quibbles.

“Are you?” Eames drawls.

_"Of course not."_

“Well then,” Eames grunts and promptly snaps the battered flip phone shut.

He orders another rum and the bartender chats amiably with him. Eames’ Afrikaans is passable, but South African dialects confuse him, and it takes work to sustain more than small talk.

He sips the rum, starts shading in the beam across Simon’s shoulders on the back of his Wellington postcard.

“Getting grumpy in your old age?” a voice behind him demands.

Eames jumps, startled. Spins on his barstool, brandishing his pencil like a rapier.

Arthur’s lips twist into a smirk as he waves his phone in the air.

“How are you not dead yet?” he asks.

“With extreme difficulty,” Eames replies, heart swallowed back down as he returns to his Fifth Station.

Arthur takes a seat next to Eames at the long, generously stocked bar, ordering a beer in an unfamiliarly friendly voice.

Eames continues his doodle with vastly increased concentration. He can feel Arthur watching him.

The sun is mercilessly hot today. Disgracefully so.

Eames is wearing a layer of sweat like a second skin.

Arthur, his hair slicked back with pomade, wearing something suspiciously close to a suit, looks like he’s just walked out of a furnace.

Eames ignores the swan lines of his neck, the solid grip of his fingers around the bottle of beer the bartender slides over to him.

“You learned some new lingo, then,” Eames grunts belligerently.

“Had to start somewhere,” Arthur concedes.

Eames does not accept the gentle olive branch as Arthur waves it. He moves onto the Sixth Station, traces the outline of the weeping Veronica. He can feel ten thousand eyes on him, fireflies in the night.

 _A plague upon my house,_ he thinks to himself.

“Happy birthday,” Arthur says after an awkward, insistent pause.

Eames feels his shoulders twitch a little.

“Did you achieve all the things you were hoping to achieve in your year as a twenty-seven-year-old?” Arthur asks.

There’s a breeze in his voice, teasing. It’s light as the sunshine that tints this parched corner of the world so golden, playful as the kids in the basketball court over the road.

It rips through Eames like petrol set alight. A burst of fiery rage tears apart the serenity with which he has sat here undisturbed all day, fuelled by the rum and the heat and the feeling of impotence that has trapped him here.

“What do you fucking think?” he roars, and his glass tumbles out of his hand, shatters on the floor, dark liquid spilling over his feet.

Arthur flinches violently, the soft grin torn from his face. He blinks, astounded. Afraid.

Between them, on the other side of the bar, the bartender watches tensely.

“Jammer,” Eames waves at the man, emptying his faded leather wallet of rands and turning to leave.

He feels the near stagger of his walk, feels Arthur’s eyes follow him, and his feet, too.

Curiously, he stays behind Eames, several steps away.

Or, it would be curious, if Eames could think past the blood burning through him. He keeps his head bowed, partly to hide from the blinding sunlight, his sunglasses abandoned on the swiftly vacated bar, and partly to hide the expression on his face.

He storms quickly into the refuge he has been hiding in all week, into the dark of the apothecary fronted by a man called Mamello and his wife, Tale. The medicine man who can gift his customers all their dreams come true.

“Eames,” Mamello says, startled, jovial, suspicious.

Stops at the sight of Arthur scurrying after him.

Eames hurries down an unlit corridor that's full of ghosts, propelled by his humiliation and fury, Arthur’s feet a spray of gunfire after him.

He stops only when he reaches the back room, the Narnia wardrobe of unsolicited substances and crates of seventy proof bottles.

“Eames, stop,” Arthur says uselessly in the doorway.

Eames can’t look at him. Can’t find that penetrating stare because one day,  _one day,_ that’s all he wants,  _this day_ to fall apart under the crushing weight of all the choices he has made that led him here, to this destruction of his soul, with only a twenty-two-year-old ex-Lieutenant genius to witness it.

He braces his hands against the nearest shelf, neck straining to hold his fuzzy head up, paper-weighted by a hundred years of memories that never happened.

“What’s wrong?” Arthur asks, boyish charm at a loss and Eames giggles frightfully.

The badly held tears drip down his face hotter than the sweat trailing down his back. He gasps for breath, shaking violently and he hears Arthur step down into this drug den of a pantry.

Petrified at the thought of Arthur’s proximity, perhaps even that he might reach out, might touch Eames in a mistaken act of comfort, comfort that would break him irreparably, Eames swings around to look at him.

His face is young, full of trepidation, white and pink as a doll. He’s holding Eames’ sunglasses, the half-illustrated postcards he left behind.

“Do you know what I did, on this day, last year?” Eames asks, voice cracked as an egg shell.

Arthur, lost, shakes his head.

“I taught a twenty-year-old woman how to forge. Do you know how I did that?”

Another shake, a face that begs not to know.

“I peeled her skin off, like stickers off books. I did it until her pain was so great, her fear so terrible, that she grew a new skin, belonging to someone else.”

Arthur swallows.

Sweat trickles over his eyebrows and he pulls the postcards in his hands closer to his torso, as if the truth has tugged him inwards.

He opens his mouth and closes it again.

A wounded sound echoes through the room and Eames doesn’t recognise himself in its shapeless vowels. He moves his hands aimlessly about himself, looking for a bottle to hold, or a neck to wring.

His fingers are trembling, halfway to drunk and almost at the brink of withdrawal.

“I didn’t –” he says, looking around the room in search of the words that have evaded him all his life.

He can speak more languages than he has fingers to count, but he still hasn’t found the words to express the deep, resonant wrongness that sits inside his chest where his heart is supposed to be.

And Arthur, Young King Arthur, only now in this precise moment does he look at Eames without asking for answers. And the loss of that trusting stare, it is a pinprick in an open wound and a balm over a burn.

“You didn’t what?” Arthur asks gently.

Eames laughs and blinks and shrugs. Goldfish mouth of horrors.

“I don’t think I was supposed to survive,” Eames says, hopeless and surprised.

It’s true, he realises as Arthur’s expression twitches into hurt confusion.

He’d been pretending ever since that letter signed  _Carnus_ showed up at his door, but the truth is he never intended to outlive his tenure under Robertson’s thumb.

In a blaze of glory or a thief in the night, he’d never really  _meant_ to survive. But he has and now he’s spiralling.

Arthur’s face creases in understanding, a strange gentility, cotton smooth as he takes a step closer.

Eames steps back. His shoulder blades hit the shelf behind him.

Bottles clink and rattle and Arthur steps forward again, hands raised, still holding the sunglasses and the postcards.

He looks like he’s approaching a bucking horse and Eames clenches his teeth together hard, the grinding thunderous inside his head. He squeezes his eyes shut and his shoulders are up at his ears in hesitation.

He holds it all inside himself like bullets in the barrel of a wet gun. Terror is piercing holes in all his vital organs, leaking through in like oil out of an engine and he wants it to stop,  _he_ wants to stop. He needs it to end because he has no use for himself anymore.

“Alex,” that wheat soft voice whispers.

A hand flat on his chest, directly over his hummingbird heart.

“Alex, look at me,” Arthur says.

Slowly, painfully, Eames opens his eyes.

Arthur’s standing incredibly close. Close enough that their noses almost brush, that it would take no effort at all for their lips to do the same, but they don’t. In this sacred sanctuary Eames looks at Arthur, his eyes hazel, almost gold. The panic releases out of him in the rhythm of Arthur’s own breaths, until they are just standing close.

Eames blinks, tears stinging in his dry eyes, so that they slide silently down his face.

Arthur smiles, a sad expression, less than pity, more than empathy.

He licks his lips and Eames mirrors the movement unconsciously.

“You made the right choice,” Arthur says.

Eames nods, even though he’s not entirely sure he agrees. He’s made a hundred thousand choices and he doubts very much that many of them have been right.

Tentatively, Eames takes back the postcards from Arthur’s hand.

“Thank you,” he says quietly.

“No problem,” Arthur replies, his hand slipping off Eames’ chest, water over a dislodged rock.

 

.

.

 _(Do you love me now?_ he asked)

.

.

**(from the wreckage of his pride)**

.

.

Slovenia has never been frightening before. It’s always been beautiful and ruinous and now it’s dangerous, too.

It holds captive something very precious to Eames. The person who holds a piece of Eames too poisonous to keep for himself.

Outside Ljubljana, there stretches a dirt road adorned with thorny burrows and dotted with buildings long since forsaken. The outhouses of Slavic history.

Bolt holes for the thieves and the badgers.

Eames walks down this road until it disappears.

His shoes crack and break, sweat patches swell into his clothes. He has two badly bruised ribs and out of the corners of his eyes, spirits speckle into view.

A jackdaw follows him for a long part of his journey, her glinting eyes tracking his beleaguered movements. He talks to her, tells her stories of dreams outgrown.

In the distance, very slowly, three long buildings appear, chicken coop small at first. Abandoned barracks by the looks of it.

The wind snickers through the long grass and Eames is almost certain he's been spotted by now.

He walks at the same meandering pace.

Takes in the cerulean glory of the sky. Colourless clouds and burnt green land.

He comes to the fence too soon.

The sun is past her peak, bronzing in the afternoon snooze.

Two guards, they've clocked him from outside the nearest building. He makes eye contact with the taller one, his swarthy face crystallised in the heat.

Eames steps through the dead shrubbery, clambers through a gap in the fence that can only be intentional. He walks forward, four steps, seven.

Stops.

Cautiously, Eames reaches into the back of his jeans, under his shirt, making it perfectly clear what he is up to.

The guards shift the rifles in their hands warningly.

Still, he extracts the gun slowly, their eyes following his movements. Even when he readies the Glock, they don't flinch. Obedient sheepdogs, clawed but toothless.

Eames raises the loaded weapon high above his head and shoots six times in a row. The crack of the bullets firing up into the swollen sky erupt a commotion from inside the building.

The guards drop to their knees and yet  _still_ they don't shoot.

Eames laughs very loudly.

In the distance, a helicopter grumbles through the air.

He tosses the gun away as bodies fly like licks of flames out of the barracks, uniforms and suits, hysterical in the brewing storm of bewilderment.

Eames drops to his knees in the stony dirt. His hands are crossed above his head.

“Hello!” he shouts very loudly, circus ringmaster as the beasts congregate. “I'm looking for Grace Rigby.”

The Red Sea of armed, feverish cattle parts at the helm, revealing a woman in a pencil skirt suit, neat hair blonde and grey, face severe.

Eames smiles lasciviously at her as the LSD he'd slipped onto his tongue before he reached the fence bursts into effect around him in a violent display of ghosts.

“And my  _psycho boyfriend,"_  he says, right before four men tackle him roughly to the ground.

.

.

**(which conceals)**

.

.


	4. PART FOUR

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The truth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey lovelies,
> 
> I hope 2018 is being good to you all!  
> So, it turns out I lied about four chapters. This was so bloody long and I decided to cut it in half because it’s driving me mad trying to squash it all into a reasonable length. I hope you guys can stick with me a little longer!  
> I spent some time rewriting the first three chapters, too, but don’t worry - nothing has changed plot-wise, it will just (hopefully) read a lot better once I’m finished.  
> I was very stuck about where to cut this off. I think it will just be five chapters, but I can’t guarantee it won’t magically evolve into six…  
> Thank you so much for your lovely words and kudos. It means so much to me!  
> Finally, sorry for the delay in updating, I really thought Eames’ PoV would be the easiest for me but it’s been super tricky to navigate. Also, for any followers of my Resplendence series, I’m excited to inform you that inspiration has struck again, so you’ll see a couple more updates on that front soonish, too.
> 
> Once again, THANK YOU DARLINGS.
> 
> LRCx

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**(all faces, void)**

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.

(There are a lot of almosts in their criss-crossed timelines. There are dreams and realities that merge into incomprehensible shadows of possibility. A few false starts and one or two instances of backtracking.)

.

.

(In the end, when they happen, they happen like this.)

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.

Eames arrives in Naples late.

He’s harboured a romantic affection for Italy all his life, courtesy of Joan Dalrymple’s obsession with the Pentamerone and a nanny from Turin who lasted all of five weeks before quitting in a flurry of gesticulations and curse words from his superstitious mother.

Not to mention that as a boy he had really liked the word Mafia. He liked it then because it made his father twitch with annoyance even though he didn’t know why, and he likes it now because it reminds him of the bar his mother frequented in Soho, the man with the bristly moustache kisses on each cheek and his finely-honed temper.

And in any case, he adores Nick and Vivi, the double act twins that could outwit the devil with their charms, stealing secrets from minds as easily as Eames sneaks wallets out of coats.

Out of the military’s contractual chokehold they have renamed themselves Vic and Nini, which made Eames chortle proudly when he heard it.

“No way I’m calling you that,” he said at the time, so Nick and Vivi they remain to him.

They’re hardly inner circle material, but Nick’s uncle is very fond of him and Vivi has an ex-boyfriend that still calls from time to time. So Eames, despite his long list of grievances, has nothing to fear when he reaches the city of secret suits and knives for the third time in his life.

Their house is in the outskirts, smells of Catholicism and tomatoes on vines and oil paints.

Vivi kisses his cheeks and wipes off the lipstick with hard, thin thumbs. She’s dark haired, graceful as a panther with a sultry bite in her voice.

“Il Capitano,” she calls him playfully. “We’ve already eaten. But there’s cheese?”

“Only if you’ve got some of the French stuff,” Eames teases gently, following her down the narrow yellow hallway to a maple and mauve dining room.

Nick greets him with the same warm hostility as his sister, then starts pouring the wine.

“How can I help?” Eames asks, mouth refreshed with their personal batch of Fiano di Avellino and his ego newly stroked by their enthusiasm at his arrival.

“We’ve found Deacon,” Vivi says bluntly.

She plays with an opal hanging on a cord around her neck, white knuckles it like a lucky penny.

Eames blinks.

“Sorry?” he asks, doesn’t intend to sound so disbelieving but it spills out of him anyway. Doubt, a thin veneer to mask something darker.

Vivi pulls a grimace of agreement while Nick pours more wine.

“How on earth have you managed that?” he asks to cover up the tracks of his accidental mistrust.

“By accident, of course,” Nick replies grimly. “We worked a job in Thessaloniki earlier this year – have you been there? Terrible place.”

Eames has in fact been to Thessaloniki before.

He liked it a lot, liked the sun on the stones and the olive tree fragility of the peace they kept there.

(Still, this feels like the wrong time to argue with a Roman about the Greeks.)

“Caught wind of him there,” Nick continues, propping his feet up on another chair and puffing out his chest. “Well, one of his aliases. Wesson, remember?”

Eames nods silently. Yes, he remembers.

“We think it’s time we find out who he was working with, don’t you?” Vivi asks.

She’s more agitated than her brother, who sips his wine calmly, watching Eames with eagle intent.

They have the same eyes, a burnt bronze shade that should belong only to owls and nymphs.

“I’ll call Jeremy,” he says after a few moments.

Victory like starlight in their smiles.

“He deserves a piece,” Vivi agrees.

.

.

Arthur, for all of his dismay at the idea of returning to the costume of Lieutenant Jeremy Howard, takes very little convincing.

After all, he’s got as much right as they do to Deacon’s subconscious, to the secrets he stores.

.

.

He arrives in Naples less than two days later.

.

.

Eames picks him up from the airport. The plane’s delayed by a few minutes and it makes Eames jitter, feet of hot coals and struck matches.

There aren’t many waiting at the gate. A few suits, a mother with four children under the age of ten. An elderly couple who hover as close as they can to the barrier, their hands clasped together and their eyes never leaving the closed doors.

When the trickle of new arrivals come, Eames holds up a limp sheet of paper he’d torn out of his book at the last minute and scribbled a fat curl of a  _Leff Tenant._

Arthur is among the first to appear through the double doors, crisp and slender and carrying a hefty shoulder bag.

The twitch in his mouth when he scowls at Eames’ welcome sign is definitely a smile battling through.

Eames takes the win without comment, crumpling the paper into his pocket.

“Did you miss me?” he asks to no reply.

Not that he expected one. He duly takes Arthur’s bag from him, sliding it from his shoulder and onto his own while Arthur rolls his shoulder appreciatively, clicking his neck. Eames steps back, soaks in the aeroplane and whisky sip glory of Lieutenant Jeremy Howard.

“You’re wearing a suit,” he says indignantly.

Arthur raises his eyebrows.

“You don’t approve?”

Of course Eames approves. He looks positively edible, even with his dark hair slicked back like that.

“It’s – it’s designer. God, what is California doing to you? You should be doing  _yoga_ and getting stoned, not turning into  _Mr Armani,"_  he replies instead, marvelling none too shyly at the bespoke tailored suit with only slightly false disgust.

“Tom Ford, actually,” Arthur preens. “Do you really only know  _one_ designer label?”

Eames swallows down the mountain of crudely unwelcome things he could say to that one. He knows Arthur senses it, because his expression contorts into a challenge.

There’s a time for this argument, but it isn’t now, and this is hardly the place, either. Eames turns to briskly lead the way to the car.

“How have you explained to the Cobbs that a newly minted post-grad can afford designer suits?” he asks.

The airport is small, calm in the midweek lull despite the cresting peak of summer. As the scorching heat of the outside world hits them, he hears Arthur sigh.

“I may have worked a job with Bella Neita,” Arthur says, sounding close to  _rueful._

“Bella?” Eames cries, astounded. “Oh  _Arthur_. I’d have thought a woman like that would offend your delicate sensibilities.”

“No, I –” Arthur looks at him accusingly. “What do you mean?”

Eames glances at him fondly; at his pretty fawn face and his sleek Tom Ford suit.

“I’ll explain when you’re older, love,” he murmurs.

The confusion in Arthur’s face prickles him acutely and Eames looks away, wishes he could take it back. But the word is out there, now, dancing between them like the thin red line of their loyalty.

Thankfully they reach the car before Eames can fully insert the rest of his foot into his mouth.

He opens the boot for Arthur’s luggage, slams it shut again and hurries, rather childishly, to the driver’s seat.

Arthur follows more slowly, clambers into the passenger side with that gazelle legged grace that never fitted well with khaki and combat boots.

“You don’t suit blond,” he says as Eames pulls out of the incredibly overpriced parking space.

Eames scoffs, despite his indifference to the matter.

“I  _am_ blond,” he says, pursing his lips.

The interior of the car is even hotter than outside, infecting them with irritation like heat rash.

“Not  _this_ blond,” Arthur retorts, goes as far as to reach over and ruffle the white blond streaks in his hair.

Eames ducks away defensively.

“Fancied a change,” he mutters.

It’s the truest lie he can muster.

He always fancies a change once the season turns but more than that, he’s Alex right now, not Eames. Alex is ex-SAS on the run. Alex is beachy trash, clean shaven and a fan of tennis shirts.

Arthur’s grown used to  _Dolos_ in this past year. Black shirts and too much hair gel and Italian leather belts that match his shoes. Alex, on the other hand, doesn’t wear belts at all.

He lets his tattoos show in the cuts of his t-shirts and wears  _flip flops,_  for Christ’s sake.

As the car strips through the winding countryside, there crackles between them the inexplicable storm of unmentionable things. Things that haven’t seen the light of day since Bratislava.

For the past year they have played the roles they built for themselves. Arthur and Eames, Carnus and Dolos.

Carnus and Dolos have diligently been ticking off their list of chores, meeting every few weeks for jobs that leave blood without footprints, black spots in their wake.

On the other hand, of course, Arthur and Eames have never officially met.

Arthur is a biochem graduate, the protégé of California sweethearts Mr and Mrs Cobb.

Eames is an art forger in Australia, the brains behind that Penrose Heist that nobody heard about.

Now, they are Jeremy and Alex once again and the costumes are ill-fitting. They shed these snake skins eighteen months ago, handed in their resignations with dam-busting bullets through cloaked IP addresses and back channel servers.

Eames has never had much trouble with changing his name, which is partly why he took to the facelessness of forging so fluidly.

He wonders, sometimes, if Arthur struggles to be so many people at once. The sullen Jeremy, the collected Arthur, the ruthless Carnus.

If he does, he’s never mentioned it.

(Eames knows better than to ask.)

He drives back to the city, scraping the top end of acceptable speeding, ignoring the way Arthur keeps looking at him.

They’re treading dangerous waters. At any moment, Eames knows he could succumb and there’d be no going back.

Because Arthur never loved Eames more than when he was Jeremy, and Eames never hated himself more than when he was Alex.

He knows Arthur’s thinking the same thing.

He also knows that Nick is going to assume they’re screwing, that Vivi is going to know they aren’t but pretend otherwise.

Eames cracks open the windows, hoarse roar of air rushing in to block out the watchful silence.

Arthur laughs, a bubble of sound that  _Jeremy_ has never made before. It lights Eames’ insides as singularly as a struck match.

He laughs as well, though at what he isn’t sure.

.

.

Nick’s sly looks are very discouraging.

Vivi’s, too.

Then there’s the way Nick says  _Good to see you, Jeremy,_  so pointed, because he  _knows._

He knows Arthur’s new name, knows Eames’.

Maybe, unlike every other soul that ever heard of dreamshare, he knows about Dolos and Carnus, too.

.

.

“He’s been holed up in a hotel for weeks already, pretending to be a novelist. People love telling writers things. They think they will turn up in a book one day.”

Vivi has a truly uncomfortable habit of maintaining eye contact for too long. She has an intrusive, tawny owl face. Dangerously lovely.

Eames is very conscious of his blinking, stubbornly refusing to break.

She looks away first and yet somehow, Eames is left feeling like he lost the contest anyway.

“Visitors?” Arthur asks, scribbling away in a moleskin notebook like the fake academic he is. Unlike Eames, he had been welcomed to Naples with a grand meal, champagne and a vial of their best deep sleep somnacin.

Eames thinks it’s his baby face that does it. Brings out the cooing gentility in even the hardiest of criminals. Or maybe he’s just incredibly clever and the Mafia Minor twins want to keep him sweet.

“Plenty,” Vivi replies, turning her hunter’s gaze to the youngest member of their makeshift, Oneiroi Quartet. “Lots of people to interview, of course.”

“What do you think he’s doing?” Arthur asks.

“What else?” Nick cuts in from across the room where he’s surrounded by blue prints. “He’s an extractor  _and_ a cleaner. He’s collecting.”

“What if he isn’t?” Eames asks.

Three pairs of eyes, all suspicion and drive like a pack of wild dogs.

“What do you mean?” one of them asks. Eames isn’t sure which. He’s staring at Arthur’s black notebook, the deep curls of his writing.

(If Eames was a sentimental man, he’d have kept that first note from  _Carnus,_  but he’s not.)

A thought has occurred to him. One that leaves him cold.

“What if he’s teaching?”

“What do you mean?”

This time, Eames  _knows_ it’s Arthur, not only because he watches that curved cupid’s bow bend around the question, but because nobody dislikes repeating themselves as much as Arthur, and his annoyance is arched as a rainbow.

“What sort of visitors?” Eames asks Vivi instead of answering, much to Arthur’s visible impatience.

“All sorts,” Vivi supplies unhelpfully, then purses her lips in thought. “Men, mostly. Usually very well dressed, sometimes with security details.”

“And how long do they stay?” Eames asks eagerly.

He is very aware of his heart pressing against his ribcage, of his tongue in his mouth.

“A few hours, most of a day” Vivi says, looking curious and lost.

“Have you ever recognised any of them?” he asks.

Vivi shakes her head.

Eames sits back in his chair, hoping desperately he’s wrong but he isn’t, he  _knows_ he isn’t. He looks at Arthur, at his frown and his hair gel and his ears that still stick out a bit, the final remnants of his teenage awkwardness.

“Alex,” Arthur calls, pulling him back to the present with all the subtlety of an elastic band snapping mid-stretch.

“He’s training people in dreamshare.”

“Training who?” Nick asks.

Vivi, however, catches on. Grabs the threads of Eames’ thoughts spilling like burst nerve endings through the air. She opens her mouth, goldfish gape.

“Anyone who’ll pay,” Eames replies bitterly. “Anyone with money to spend and secrets to protect. He’s teaching them how to guard their subconscious against extraction.”

The idea fills the room like gas.

 _Don’t think about elephants,_  Eames once said to his Bravo Team. He watched as collectively they thought about elephants.

It happens again now. He watches the seed germinating, taking root inside his fellow extractors’ heads, the way it sprouts and blooms inside them.

“He’s teaching everyday citizens…” Vivi begins and ends, like the drift of an incomplete dream.

“Ingenious,” Nick says, repulsed and awestruck, tossing his pencil onto the table before him with all the finality of slamming a door shut on his way out.

“We need to stop him,” Arthur says, looks oddly haunted and Eames knows exactly what has occurred to him.

“I don’t think it’s quite military grade,” he says.

Arthur meets his gaze, eyes dark with the ripples of his thoughts.

“It’s  _dangerous!”_ he says, loud in the swell of realisation that Eames has brought forth.

“It’s somewhat inconvenient,” Eames agrees to a betrayed look from Arthur.

 _"Inconvenient?"_  he hisses. “Alex, he’s introducing untrained civilians to technology that could kill them. He could drive them mad.”

“Deacon was a traitor,” Eames interrupts with a flick of his hand that dispels the irony threatening his words. “But he was never an idiot.”

Arthur swallows down what was probably a stream of curse words that, for all his slick hair and double windsor knots, he still looks too young to know.

“It was only a matter of time,” Nick says quietly. “As soon as extraction got out there, its counterpart was bound to follow.”

“Does it change anything?” Vivi asks brusquely.

All three men turn to her.

She shrugs with both shoulders, a surprisingly violent movement that tosses a lock of her curled black hair out of its clip.

“He’s still the menace that got away in Istanbul,” she continues. “He’s still the bastard who killed her.”

Between them, unspoken of until now, the ghost of Dorotka, her mousy face and surly muttering, rises among them with spectral grace.

Nick nods, although Arthur still seems too shaken by his own revulsion to respond.

“Does it change anything?” Vivi asks again.

“Of course not,” Eames answers.

Vivi nods righteously, a look of defiance in her eyes.

“Well then,” she tuts.

Nick gives her a soft look, half a frown, less than sympathetic.

She returns to her computer and immediately starts clicking furiously. From this angle, most of her face is obscured by her hair but Eames thinks he catches a glimpse of a menacing smile stretched tightly across her face.

Arthur buries his nose in his notebook.

There’s no smile in his expression. He’s burning with vengeance, like a star on the edge of implosion.

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They leave the following day.

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(In the firelight, when it’s not quite the lonely hour, when the wine stains their glasses:  _It was a good thing. I believe that. But I did it for bad reasons.)_

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.

“What does Nick have against this place?” Arthur asks from the balcony of the flat in Thessaloniki.

“He’s Italian,” Eames grunts in response, a glass of rosé in his hand that makes Arthur roll his eyes. “He needs something to complain about.”

“Vi doesn’t,” Arthur says obstinately.

Eames returns to the airy living space inside, pours Arthur a glass and leaves it on the counter.

“She has him to complain about,” he replies coolly.

Arthur follows him inside, barefoot, wearing another of his Ford suits. His tie is purple and obnoxiously expensive looking. As always, Eames ignores his urge to yank it hard.

Arthur, meanwhile, ignores the rosé, crossing his arms over his chest.

“Do they know about us?” Arthur asks.

Eames raises his eyebrows and Arthur blushes, but for perhaps the first time doesn’t turn away to hide it. He stares brazenly, pink cheeks glowing, expectantly.

“Whatever makes you think that?” Eames asks in return. When that doesn’t work, Eames puts down his wine and folds his own arms over his chest to mirror his confronter. “They know about Arthur and Eames,” he confesses. “They might suspect the other dynamic duo.”

Arthur swallows. His lower lips swelling where his tongue presses in behind it. Boyish concentration with a creased brow to match.

A breeze dances through the thin white curtains that hide the balcony. It’s evening time, the sun creeping towards the horizon, purpling the stretched clouds above.

Deacon, known to the Mediterranean as Wesson, is staying in a hotel less than ten minutes away. There’s nothing more to do until Vivi reports back, though. Nick won't even arrive with the PASIV for another two days.

At twenty-three, Arthur still has the face of a university freshman. There’s softness in his cheeks that belies the razor edges of his temper.

Only his eyes betray him.

They’re full of confidence, now. The questions that they hold aren’t needy anymore; they’re defiant. There’s a certainty to this man that Eames doesn’t know.

“You’re different,” he says.

It’s an accident, really, and the surprise that tilts Arthur’s expression makes Eames squirm where he stands.

“So are you,” Arthur replies.

This feels less true.

Eames hasn’t changed much at all. It’s Arthur’s vision that’s improved, ever since those rose-tinted glasses were ripped off his face in Cape Town.

Eames glances uncomfortably at the balcony. There’s not enough oxygen in the air between them, or maybe there’s too much. Either way, he’s struggling against his tightening lungs.

“I have a question,” Arthur states, the way another person might mutter their darkest secret to their reflection.

Eames’ silent question in return, distorted and crumpled between them. He looks at Arthur expectantly, bracing himself.

“Who’s Romany Grace?”

In the stop-stutter momentum of his confusion, Eames almost asks  _Who?_

Then he huffs, bemused.

“She was my best friend. We grew up together.”

Arthur shakes his head, like he’s actually going to disagree with him.

“I can’t find her,” he says candidly.

The words jar inside Eames. He feels violated and oddly proud, though of himself for hiding her so well or Arthur for looking at all, he’s not sure.

Outside a bird screeches, disturbing the fragile barrier between them, a thin wall of ice.

“What?” he asks, expression scrunched even worse than Arthur’s, who hisses through his teeth.

“I looked. I can’t - I don’t know who she is,” he admits, sounding for all the world like he’s vehemently refusing to be embarrassed by his own actions, despite thinking he maybe should be. “I checked your dad, your mom. I assumed it would be something to do with your mom – maybe even  _be_ her. But I can’t find her – don’t laugh!” he cries as a chirping explosive sound bursts out of Eames.

“Arthur,” Eames replies placatingly, hands raised in surrender.

Arthur’s having none of it, though. He throws his arms into the air, as if swatting away a plague of locusts brought in by Eames’ teasing.

He’s manic and perplexed and really quite angry. He snarls with ugly bravado.

“No!” he shouts, his cheeks painted a darker shade of pink than frustration alone can mix. “You’re infuriating, Alex,” he snaps. “I don’t understand you.”

Outside, the wind titters.

“Actually, I do,” he corrects himself. “You’re narcissistic and insecure. You are incapable of looking at yourself in a mirror unless you’re wearing somebody else’s face, then when you’re forging, you’re worse than a bird of paradise.

“You can’t fathom the possibility that someone else  _might_ be cleverer than you and you are very good at pretending you don’t care.”

That sound again, jackal wild and his hands are shaking. He looks ready to wring Eames’ neck where he stands, astounded.

“You  _don’t_ care most of the time!” Arthur shouts, pained and offended. He’s panting, and he shakes his head.

Then he softens abruptly, as if he's remembered what he reached this point to say.

“But you came to Iran when I needed you even though I didn’t ask. You came to Cairo when I asked even though I didn’t really need you. And the truth is…”

For the first time, Arthur falters, adrift in the sea of his outburst. His muddy, hazel eyes are bright and old.

“I’ve tried not to – but I do.”

Ashamed of himself, or maybe he just thinks he should be. He inspects his bare feet, his twisting hands.

“You’re the worst person in the world, Eames. You really are,” he mutters, only to brave a glimpse at Eames’ startled face. “But you’re not.”

The quiet surrounding them is no longer. Eames has no idea if the cricket song has always been there or not, but it’s deafening now. The shriek of insects louder than the birds, louder than church bells.

That thin wall of ice has cracked, shattered by this lightning strike that has pierced them both.

“How do you know who my parents are?” he asks, aiming for facetious and coming up incredibly short.

Arthur looks at him. Really looks at him.

It seizes Eames, that look. Holds him down like an anchor: steady, restraining.

“Eames,  _please,”_ Arthur says, snobbish know-it-all that he is.

And in that moment, Eames knows that Arthur will always look at him like that.

He will always look at him with that disdainful, adoring expression. He has always done, and he will always do, even in fifty years’ time.

He's gotten so used to that look that he forgot how bloody wonderful it is, forgot what it really  _means_.

(It means  _I am here.)_

“Oh,” Eames whispers in a long, drawn out sigh. “Darling.”

The tidal wave of ferocity that sweeps through him is brand new and achingly familiar.

It’s six years coming yet Eames is utterly unprepared.

Three strides and a laugh away, his hands mould themselves to that clean-cut jaw, his fingers tucking through hair that’s too short, too full of fucking _hair gel._

Eames kisses him. Kisses him until it hurts to breathe. Until all the right angles of their dissonance are boneless and that face, the only face he’ll never quite be able to forge well enough, sinks against his own.

.

.

(Of course, the honeymoon period barely outlives the afterglow.)

.

.

_What the fuck is that supposed to mean?_

Nothing, Alex.

_I’m Eames, you know. Not Alex. Can’t you tell the difference?_

Not really. You’re both total assholes.

.

.

As it turns out, whoever he really is, he’s even harder to love as Eames than he was as Alex.

.

.

**(of compassion)**

.

.

 _(And my psycho boyfriend_ , he said, wishing someone was there to get the joke.)

.

.

They keep his wrists pinned to his lower back, strained upwards in deliberate threat to his overworked shoulder sockets.

There’s a bag over his head, which is quite frankly absurd but at least it muffles the snarling voices of his arresting guards.

He counts the steps he’s dragged over, rattling kneecaps that have been dutifully battered by heavy handed batons. Right turn, right turn, left turn, left turn.

He comes to the conclusion that they’ve circuited the main corridors of the building twice, then returned to the first turn off.

A door opens loudly up ahead, a rush of air and a flail of limbs. He hits the ground very hard, face smacking with blinding speed into concrete.

“Get up,” a woman says, transatlantic lilt.

It’s takes a few tries to get his hands under his weight. His knees burn from the cartilage squashed bruises and it takes several pulls to get the black cloth off his head.

Wheezing, he turns over to look blearily up at Grace Rigby, his grin red, animal pleased.

“Hello, Miss Rigby,” he leers. About him, the walls splinter and vibrate.

Her face is distorted by the pleasure drug melted paper thin into his tongue. A tiny dose, just enough to destabilise his subconscious if they try to take him under.

He can feel Grace Rigby watching him though she’s little more than a blur of blonde and blue, feel her judgement condemning him as he back crawls slowly until he reaches a chair, metal, bolted to the floor and rusty grey.

With fumbling fingers, he pulls himself into it.

His joints are in shock, but his hands find their way. Finally, he’s seated.

He rests his forearms on the chair’s poles, waiting to be handcuffed into place.

Behind the woman, another figure. Quite tall, salt and pepper, the wet tang of aftershave and ink.

“Hello, Robertson,” he greets jovially, coughing out a laugh that presses like fingers over his damaged ribs. “I suppose this isn’t exactly what you meant when you said I’d achieve great things.”

The man is blurred, obscure and displeased, snorting like a bull.

“Not quite,” Robertson replies icily.

“But you’ve got to admit it,” Eames continues lazily as two guards zip tie his hands into place. “You’re impressed.”

If he squints, he can just about make out Robertson’s violently disturbed expression through his double vision.

“Awestruck,” the man says, so quiet the letters seem to tangle up in the air like swirling dust. “What did you take, Alexander?” he asks, putting one hand fearlessly over Eames’ perspiring forehead.

“Just a little tonic for the nerves,” Eames chuckles.

His throat is dry, but he can taste copper in his teeth. His eyes struggle against wakefulness, fire and water in his lungs.

“Hallucinogen,” Rigby guesses with disgust. “And a sedative, too, I suppose. He’s useless to us now.”

“Only for a short while,” Robertson replies steadily.

“You’re not going to drag this out, are you?” Eames groans.

He doesn’t need to be in his right mind to sense Robertson’s trembling nerves. The man’s foundations are pulling apart, the tectonic plates of his righteousness and his confidence are grinding to crumbs beneath his feet and Eames can taste it like blood in the water.

“We’ll see,” replies Robertson, or maybe Rigby.

.

.

“What will you do if they decide they don’t need you?” Yusuf had asked fretfully. “What if they just kill you instead?”

“Then I’ll be dead,” Eames had replied.

.

.

The thing is, Eames knows Robertson. Knows him like a recurring nightmare from his childhood.

He won’t let Eames rest until he has excavated the mine of his mind, plucked out the pyrite and separated it from the gold dust.

He will want to know, to understand.

.

.

(And it will be his downfall.)

.

.

An LSD trip is a pact not to be entered lightly. Bad or good, it’s inescapable.

They leave him to it.

Well, Grace Rigby does. Robertson lasts all of eighteen minutes before he sidles back into the room, hackles raised and wearing a stricken expression.

Eames’ head lolls to one side from the sedative, even as lights dance across his eyes.

“Can’t resist, can you?” he asks, must slur it because Robertson only frowns.

“Who is following you?” Robertson demands. “Someone’s coming for you.”

Eames’ slack expression splits into a lemon bitter grin. He blinks lazily, hurtfully.

“Wouldn’t you like to know,” he replies, making sure to articulate every syllable.

Robertson scowls at him this time.

“Why did you come here of your own volition?” he asks.

Ferret-fretting, his jugular twitching. Or maybe it’s Eames’.

“You have no advantage now,” he mutters.

It sounds an awful lot like he’s trying to convince himself, rather than Eames. Robertson steps closer to his prisoner, slump-drunk in his chains.

“Why would you do this?”

Eames just focuses very hard on not throwing up or falling asleep.

(Or doing both, which would probably be the worst of all.)

“Alexander,” Robertson says, looming like a creature of Tolkien’s, so high over Eames he has to crane his stretched neck. “Who is coming for you?”

“Remember what you said, sir?” Eames asks teasingly.

Robertson shakes his head nervously, one jerk to the side.

“Watch out for the gypsy,” Eames quotes with slippery relish. His tongue is numb, his throat burns. “Did you?”

“Did I what?”

Eames lunges forward, caged tiger strapped down, his teeth gnashing. Robertson leaps back, away from this snapping fiend.

“Did you watch out for the gypsy?” he asks harshly.

Then he cackles, a heavy sound. It’s dragged from him by the drugs ploughing through him and the delight of seeing a disarmed Robertson.

“You forgot!” he bellows. “And you regret it, don’t you?”

Robertson, horrified and baffled, and Eames hears his own voice echo back in ringlets of dismay.

 _Rinne tú dearmad!_ His voice rattles.  _An bhfuil tú bron orf?_

 _"Tá mo aghaidh i bhfolach,"_  Eames mumbles into Morpheus’ grip, which rests loosely around his throat.

“Who is coming for you, Dalrymple?”

Eames stares through his rage to the terror beneath. He leans against his restraints and says, very quietly, lullaby cotton.

“The real question, Darren, is who is coming for your children?”

Eames feels Robertson’s knuckle break as it smashes into his cheekbone.

(Feels the crack in his cheekbone, too.)

.

.

He drifts, then. Sinks unreachable and deep into the ocean, where Robertson’s fury is little more than the hum of a dying wasp, futile as it charges over and over into a pane of glass.

.

.

Waking up is a risk.

.

.

Waking up doesn’t necessarily mean he’s  _waking up_.

.

.

Eames wakes up.

He’s lying on his back in a cot so uncomfortable it can only be army issued. The left side of his face is throbbing so badly he’s not entirely sure he’ll be able to move his head at all.

He tries slowly; the blinding pain rattling through him makes him groan but he turns to the right.

Dirty drywall, so close he can taste the flakes of plaster.

“Hnn,” he chokes, then sets about making the laborious one-eighty turn to the left.

His left eye feels too big for its socket, his teeth too small for his mouth.

Beside him, a pale figure lying on an identical cot. He’s paper thin, hair longer than it’s been in years.

Arthur stares back blearily, little rapid breaths that flutter in his chest.

Definitely a dream, then.

“Hullo,” Eames whispers. The vibration rockets through him, every pore sweats out his pain and the flinch makes it all the worse.

Arthur’s smile is small, lacks everything about him that is  _Arthur._

“Hey,” he replies, a crack of a vowel that rips his throat, makes him wince and gip. “You got my message.”

“Of course I did,” Eames mumbles, goes for warmth, practising for when he sees the real Arthur, the living, breathing one.

The Arthur who scoffs at Eames’ taste in wine and could bully a stone into bleeding freely.

The one who sketches timelines like it’s a mission from God, who tells people he’s allergic to peppermint just because he thinks it’s silly, who hates sex with the lights off almost as much as he hates speaking Spanish.

This carbon copy, or rather,  _cardboard_ copy by the rake thin look of him, blinks owlishly across the room at him.

“You got my message,” he whispers again.

“You had a lot to say,” Eames replies sluggishly.

Arthur’s breath hitches, shuddering in his chest so that he twitches in his cot.

“The boat,” he says.

Eames closes his eyes, shying from that disappointment.

He hopes the real Arthur forgives him.

“She couldn’t remember,” he admits, voice of tepid tea and sorrow.

No answer.

The blood pounding through Eames’ head thrums drum beats into his thoughts. He’s never noticed before that he can feel the precise join where his spine reaches his skull. It feels awfully breakable right now.

(Once, a job in Copenhagen. The mark was flirtatious and chatty in the dream, right up until he wrapped his hands around Eames’ unsuspecting head and snapped his neck.)

Eames opens his eyes just enough to see the prone figure of not-Arthur.

“It was important,” he says, and Eames starts to nod, but the entire upper half of his body violently opposes this, wracking him with a shooting pain that makes him hiss through his teeth.

“I know,” he mumbles.

“Romany Grace,” that blurred voice tells him.

Eames forces his eyes open, watering against the pain as he clenches his fists.

“Wh –” is all he manages.

Arthur’s staring at him. It’s an adoring, disdainful look.

“The boat,” he says. “Her name was Romany Grace.”

Above them, so loud it rings worse than the drums in his arteries, a _Bang!_

They flinch, looking up and sharp stars dazzle Eames as he looks above him, to a huge mirror panel stretched the length of the room.

“One way,” Arthur giggles, a little hysterical, a little sad.

Eames stares up at his reflection. The sandy spikes of his unkempt hair, his eyes dark blue, out of focus. Bristly scruff covering his jaw and half his face peppered with purple.

“I’m dreaming,” he says, because he has to be.

Surely, this is a dream.

His hands wobble as they try to reach up, stopped short by the handcuffs keeping him in place.

With what little concentration he can muster through the concussion, he stares hard at his face, tries to swaddle himself in the skin of Estella, his favourite redhead.

She doesn’t come. He only stares back at his own face, the plunge of devastation and bewilderment a charm upon his brow.

“You’re not,” Arthur says.

With painstaking effort, Eames looks away from the one-way glass.

Arthur’s hair is curled too long over his forehead.

He looks apologetic, which is surely a sign that Eames is dreaming because Arthur doesn’t  _apologise._

He didn’t apologise when he almost got Eames killed by Akintola. Not when he stole Eames’ entire cut from the Sheldon Job or even when he tried to shoot Eames out of a dream and got him in the gut, leaving him to bleed out in agony, alone inside a broken lift.

“How do you know?” he asks maybe-Arthur.

Arthur’s mouth downturns, the exact same expression as the day they got the call from Cobb, the whimpering mutters that Mallorie had finally done it.

Eames’ heart clenches and he feels it inside his mouth, weighing down his tongue.

“I couldn’t find you,” almost-certainly-Arthur says. “I tried, but your face – I forgot it. I buried you so deep, you disappeared.”

Eames can forgive him for that. He can understand burying a piece of one’s self so far that it crumbles into the oblivion of forgetfulness. It’s how he put the phone down on Sally Scott twenty years ago, as her strangled whines turn inconsolably desperate.

It’s how he looked Brandon Osmond in the eye for the last time.

“Arthur,” Eames says to the whimpering pile of pasty flesh that is Arthur, of  _course_ it’s Arthur, it’s really him. How could he not realise? Is he so lost already?

He feels his chest inflate with all the things he wants to say, the relief he wants to laugh.

Above them, another loud bang, a hand on the other side of the glass, the vengeful sentry.

Below it, the door swings open.

“Feeling better, Dalrymple?” Robertson asks.

He looks positively thrilled. He steps inside, followed by two guards, one of whom Eames is fairly certain he recognises. He doesn’t have time for a name game, though.

Robertson advances, carrying with him that same powerful aura of command that he maintained so solidly from behind his oak desk back in London. He stares grimly down at Eames, face full of all the things he wants to say.

He raises his gun just high enough for Eames to see him wave it, school bully with a fistful of lunch money.

Then he points it at Arthur, and, easy as blinking, shoots twice.

.

.

“Do you love me now?” he asked.

“No,” he replied, so empty of regret it could only be the truth.

.

.

_"Don’t you – fucking – Arthur – fuck – you – bastard – cunt – fuck – Arthur –"_

The screams tear out of Eames as hot and scattered as the blood that bursts out of Arthur’s throat where the first bullet hits.

Eames surges like the tide, feels his wrists strain in their handcuffs and Eames roars nonsensical, his lungs clam up tight against his terror and his brain shuts down at the sight of Arthur slipping instantly into the sleep of the dead.

He’s shaking and writhing and Arthur is dead.

Eames wrestles against the handcuffs and he feels the bones in his hands break.

Failure rips through his insides and he hears that voice inside his head, like all the voices he heard as a child, the real ones and the imaginary ones and that ones that terrorised his dreams.

His head is full of dying stars, he hears his mother, her whispering, feels the kick of a horse’s hooves against his chest.

Robertson lifts the gun and Eames has neither the time, the means nor the inclination to dodge the bullet that cracks through his forehead.

.

.

Eames wakes up.

.

.

“Oh, good,” Grace Rigby says as Eames sucks in a lungful of air that tastes like the first cigarette of the day after a week of sleep. “Welcome back, Mister – Eames, isn’t it?”

His heart is still fluttering, arrhythmic pulses of electricity, magnetising his fingertips.

His face hurts with the exact acute pain that it did in the dream. His ribs feel crushed.

Rigby is sitting on a chair next to him, where he lies in an army regulation with-extra-lumps cot.

Turning his dizzy head, nausea like hunger in his belly, he sees Arthur lying on an identical bed, unconscious. Robertson on a third. They are all attached to the PASIV that’s currently being guarded by three armed men.

“Are we really that dangerous?” Eames asks.

At least, he means to. All that comes out is a wet, retching sound.

Rigby pulls a pinched expression of distaste.

“Why is he still asleep?” he tries instead after a few dry swallows. This time he definitely gets the words out.

Almost certainly in the correct order, too.

Rigby isn’t here to be interrogated, though, and she isn’t Robertson. Eames doubts she’ll be so easily goaded.

“Your name came up on our radar, once, Mr Eames,” she continues, looking down at a clipboard with about as much enthusiasm as he used feel when looking at Arthur’s financial reports on jobs. “Very clever of you, marketing yourself as a thief. We dismissed you when no photos matched our records.”

Eames doesn’t have it in him to be pleased. He’s still looking at Arthur, throat unblemished, too thin, too  _asleep._

“He won’t be waking up,” Rigby says impatiently.

Eames doesn’t care. There is not one atom of Eames’ wretched body that cares for anything she has to say right now.

He just keeps looking at that grey, bony face. The deep roll of his chest is the only sign of life.

“Robertson believes you have backup on the way,” Rigby continues.

Her dry tone makes it perfectly clear she does not share Robertson’s suspicions.

“It would be very foolish of me not to,” Eames replies.

Rattling papers. Her breath the snort of a dragon.

“I think you honestly believe you’re going to see the light of day again. Don’t you?”

She makes it sound like an incredulous notion.

(Eames reminds himself to remain passive, rather than offended.)

In his sleep, the fingers of Arthur’s right hand flutter briefly.

“I think you’ve got a score to settle and you intend to extract your pound of flesh as slowly as possible, don’t you?” he asks instead.

Rigby doesn’t respond.

Before Eames can press further, there’s movement across the room. A violent jerk of hands.

Robertson’s eyes open in a flash of blinks. He pulls out the IV needle as he sits up, coiling the line with the business-like efficiency Eames used to admire in him.

“He’s gone again,” he says grumpily.

Eames looks at both of his gaolers but the concussion clouding his senses can’t match the speed of the silent conversation that passes between them.

Robertson walks over to the PASIV, whirring, and Eames sees the urge to pull the plug. To either drop Arthur into perpetual Limbo, or perhaps force Arthur into true wakefulness for the first time in – how long?

He can’t bring himself to finish the thought.

“Wily fucker, isn’t he?” Eames mumbles, punch proud and rattled.

“Don’t get cocky, Alexander,” Robertson warns.

Eames raises his eyebrows. It bubbles the nausea in his gut up into the back of his throat, but it’s worth it.

“Why?” he croaks. “You going to send me in to fetch him?”

What a downright brilliant turn of events that would be.

Impossible, of course. Impossible like a set of penrose steps. Impossible like inception.

“Still hiding aces up your sleeves?”

“Cheating is still winning, as long as you don’t get caught,” Eames reminds his old mentor. Then, before Robertson can do anything more than curl his lip, before he can voice the very obvious snag that Eames has in fact been caught this time, “How did you stop me from forging?”

He looks back at Rigby just in time to see her smile at his question. It’s a wolfish look. It suits her, pulling at the lines of her mouth, softening them.

“Oh, that was all thanks to you, Mr Eames,” she replies. “You picked exactly the wrong sedative to mix with our somnacin.”

Eames ticks his tongue behind his teeth.

Above them, that one-way glass panel, taunting him.

His reflection is worse in reality. The entire left side of his face is inflamed with bruises and it’s only when looking at it he realises the crushing feeling of his ribs is because he’s been belted down at the torso as well as his wrists and ankles.

“Well, I’m not a chemist,” he says dismissively. “So, when do we do this?”

The room smells of hospitals. He’s acutely aware that if he succumbs to the urge to vomit that’s tickling his gag reflex he will probably choke and die.

He focuses on breathing steadily through his nose.

“We’ve already started,” Robertson replies.

The gun seems so small in his hand.

This time, he shoots Arthur in the head where he lies.

Instinct bucks Eames up against his restraints. He chokes on a yell, cut short by the bullet that bursts open his heart.

.

.

Eames wakes up.

.

.

“How many times do you think a person can die before they go mad?” he asked, years ago.

“Once,” he replied, knowingly.

.

.

They do it again.

They do it again and they do it again.

Every time the panic that soars through Eames is crippling, rattlesnake venom in his throat.

He never feels the press of sleep, every reality is more vivid than the last, but every time he’s completely certain he’s awake. He keeps trying to forge but whatever they’ve got him on, he can’t break through the mask of his real face.

.

.

“I broke you once,” Robertson says the seventh time, or maybe the seventeenth. “You know, I didn’t actually think you were capable of caring about another person, Dalrymple.”

“Who says I am?” Eames murmurs while Arthur’s corpse leaks viscous into the bed.

It’s weak at best. Vulnerable at worst.

He’s so tired he could cry.

.

.

(He has no idea how many layers deep they are.)

.

.

**(nor insidious paths)**

.

.

The first morning in Wellington, Eames gets up extra early in spite of how abhorrent he finds it to be awake with the birds.

Catching the worm cannot possibly be worth this.

He buys his supplies from the one shop less than half an hour away, comes back and gets to work.

Arthur gets up just as the bacon is an acceptable level of crispy. The rolls are dripping with grease and egg yolk and Eames acknowledges him with a pallid smile and continues to wiggle his hips as he hums songs that used to make his mother’s lip curl.

Arthur pours a disgracefully generous dollop of mayonnaise inside his sandwich before devouring it in very few mouthfuls.

Eames pulls his apart more slowly, scoops up the sunny yolk from his plate while the smell of brewing coffee fills the kitchen.

Arthur’s eyes are still puffy and he’s wearing the clothes he fell asleep in yesterday, where Eames left him after three hours of hitching disquiet.

“What’s our next move?” he asks as he sucks the wet crumbs from his fingers, still not looking at Eames.

“We’ve got the furniture arriving tomorrow,” Eames says. “The last of the PASIVs are tucked away nicely.”

Arthur nods.

“How long are we safe here?” he asks.

“If no-one’s followed us, as long as we like,” Eames replies.

He stares about the kitchen, spartanly dressed as it is and tiny. He wonders who Ethel and Bertie were. If they were happy here, if they loved each other.

If they’d mind the fact it’s being rented by two criminals with either no names or too many, depending on what day of the week they’re asked.

“I was thinking about buying this place for good.”

Arthur narrows his eyes as he brushes his hands together over his plate, the soft  _slap slap_ of skin rustling too loud.

“With what money exactly?” he asks.

“I’ll get some more,” Eames shrugs.

“How?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Eames sighs. “Extraction jobs are getting very popular. Maybe I’ll forge a Francis Bacon and make a fortune.”

Arthur stares at him sullenly.

“You’d make a fine point man,” Eames continues with an assertive nod. “You’ve always been a sneaky stick in the mud.”

It’s not as fun, picking on Arthur when he’s at the end of his tether. He doesn’t parry the blows and Eames, he’s never made a habit pulling his punches.

He pours the coffee to busy his hands and Arthur watches with alien indifference.

“It’s not your –”

“No thank you,” Arthur interrupts, icy fragments in his voice that no amount of Columbian roast will thaw. “No thanks.”

Eames shuts his trap.

He knows that’s not what Arthur means.

 _Not yet_ , he’s saying.  _I’m not ready yet_.

He will be, though.

Eames watches him, the prickly curls of his hair, the pink swell of his eyelids and the bones carving the hollows of his cheeks and jaw.

If Arthur notices the scrutiny, he doesn’t say anything. He just sips his coffee and stares at Eames’ empty plate, his heart five thousand miles away.

(His dreams, further still.)

.

.

_Tell me something I don’t know about you._

Thought you knew everything, you little nerd.

_Tell me about her._

I’ll tell you about him.

.

.

The train station is packed.

Eames splashes some more milk into his cup, which does nothing for the muddy tea he’s paid a lousy two quid for.

He sits at a table near the counter, so he can eavesdrop on the customers and, better yet, the staff.

Café staff are generally speaking much more reliable sources of information than tourist info booths – and significantly easier to listen in on.

“I kid you not, he ploughed right through the barriers like a bull to a flag,” the woman by the coffee machine mutters to her colleague, who is doing a very bad impression of stacking paper cups. “He was like a man possessed!”

The woman stops cleaning the drip tray to do a mocking sign of the cross over her torso.

Her colleague, however, is unnerved. She’s much younger and still inexperienced, judging by the way she keeps putting the syrups back on the wrong shelf every time she uses one.

She stares at the older woman with huge blue eyes full of naivety and awe.

“Did he get arrested?” she asks in a whisper that Eames has to strain to hear.

The storyteller, enjoying her captive audience, chortles as she goes back to scraping the coffee grains out of the machine.

“Hauled off by guards, but Lord knows what  _they_ did with him.”

Eames battles a laugh of his own at this.

By this barista’s account, one would think Old Street Station security was some second of Wandsworth Prison.

“Was he mad?”

“Must have been! Chased by the devil like that.”

Unfortunately, they’re interrupted by a disgruntled businessman in  _dire need_ of a cappuccino. Eames has long been of the opinion that, indulgently enjoyable as they are, nobody has ever been in  _dire need_ of a drink that is mostly wilting foam.

He sips his tea grumpily, waiting for the man to clear off, but even once the customer is satisfied that he has been given a fair share of chocolate powder on top, the women don’t return to their previous discussion.

Once they get onto ranking the top five worst things customers fuss about, Eames gives it up as a lost cause.

He drains his cup, drops the tray back at the counter with a grin for both women along with a tip larger than the cost of the drink, and leaves through the side door. Old Street Station rattles with the pre-lunch rush.

It’s a Saturday, tiresome and touristy. London always tastes like lit coal, this time of year.

Eames is looking for someone.

Contrary to the barista’s belief, Eames knows for a fact the man who caused such a kerfuffle yesterday wasn’t caught by security.

Rather, he managed to slip security before they could get him out of Old Street Station, but where he went to next remains an unknown.

Being in London makes Eames nervous, always has. It’s like a scent that sticks to him, makes him feel itchy and paranoid.

He fights through the crowds to the street outside.

Drizzling blue and grey and brown.

Movement catches his eye, a familiar, easy gesture. A pale hand waving.

Eames turns and looks into the thin, stubbled face staring back at him.

There he stands, completely unafraid of being caught, utterly unaware of any present danger. An entirely different man to the one that came to this station yesterday and the day before and the day before, shouting and screaming.

As if he had forgotten.

As if it had all been only a bad dream.

Eames waves back, walks forward, tastes tar and realises he’s lit himself a cigarette without meaning to. Apprehension in his lungs worse than the smoke.

“Borley,” he says quietly when he finally reaches the man, looks into a face he smacked a thousand times, into and out of a forge.

“Jag!” Borley says cheerily. “Wondered when you’d show up.”

Around them, people huff and sidestep them, a few knocking their shoulders abrasively as they pass to make their displeasure physically known.

Borley’s hair is damp, rain trickles lightly down his face, which is prickly with scruff.

Eames’ cigarette goes out between his fingers and he drops it to the street.

“What do you mean?” he asks carefully.

There’s no way Borley could have anticipated anyone from Onieroi showing up. Not even  _Eames_ knows how many are still alive anymore.

“The dream,” Borley says condescendingly. “My projections are getting worse. But I’ve tried talking to them and they don’t know it’s me.  _That’s_ how good I am. Aren’t you proud? Not even my own mind knows when it’s me!

“But I assumed I’d dream up one of you eventually. Figured it would be you.”

Eames can’t breathe.

He feels the tight clench of his windpipe caving in, the rapid blinks of his eyes that he can’t pretend is just the rain.

Borley grins proudly at him, clearly anticipating praise.

But Eames, he can’t breathe.

“You think this is a dream?” he asks through gritted teeth.

Borley rolls his eyes.

“Not you, too! Of course. If it isn’t a dream, why do I keep ending up back here every time I die?”

Eames tries to lick his lips, but his tongue is sandpaper.

Delusions, possibly hallucinations. Black spots and memory lapses.

Eames reaches out to take Borley’s upper arm. Borley looks down at his hand with mild surprise, as if he hadn’t expected his hallucination of his old mentor to be tangible.

“Come with me,” Eames says to the man he tortured into insanity at the orders of a commander he once trusted more than himself.

And Borley, he goes willingly.

More than that, he goes  _eagerly._

He all but skips down Old Street, through the rain and crowds full of inane, chattering wonder.

Eames, deaf and breathless, holds him tight and pulls him hard.

He shakes with the feeling that they are being watched as his heart fills his mouth with blood.

.

.

He dumps the body, complete with wiped down needles and a few tiny bags stuffed in his pockets, in an alley off Leonard Street.

Doesn’t wait around to see if it’s found quickly.

.

.

(It isn’t.)

.

.

**(tread lightly, darling)**

.

.

Eames wakes up.

.

.

Eames wakes up on a bed full of belt straps and his face aches like buckshot, buried in his skull. He blinks through the blind spots where the pain is worst.

Looks up to see that one-way glass panel, silver mirror polished to a shine.

And in the mirror, he sees, lying taut beneath the restraints, a woman, fat heaving breasts squashed against her, thick auburn curls tattered over her pillow like shredded ribbons.

Eames stares at his reflection, aghast, triumphant.

The pain, while gruesome, is slowly overcast by his new skin.

Estella. His favourite redhead. His first. Named after the great heartbreaker herself.

She’s buxom and brash and sinful and Eames stares up at her reflection with the same token wonder as when he looked upon her for the very first time.

She’s freckled and glowering and the most brilliant of all his creations.

At least, so he feels in this very moment, victorious sleeper in his bed of chains.

He turns his head to the left, and with each shift the pain burrows deeper into the clay of his forge, out of reach.

Arthur’s bed is empty.

Eames smiles.

He wonders, with the kind of apathy that he thinks must surely precede a long-foreseen death, if this is Limbo.

It doesn’t take long for the boredom to tickle his bones. Arthur doesn’t appear, not alive and certainly not dead. There are no voices behind the mirror, no handprints in the glass.

He is, wondrously, alone.

Cautiously, meticulously, Eames begins the laborious task of extracting himself from his bonds.

The straps are stubborn, chafing Estella’s buttery skin. He pants with the effort and they come out soft, shirty little breaths of indignity.

Inch by inch, he writhes free until finally he can scratch open the latch pinning his upper torso.

It loosens with a click of the buckle and Eames gasps in surprise. Beneath the padding of the forge, he can feel his cracked ribs tingle.

It doesn’t take long after that.

Estella’s fingers are nimble, designed for pickpocketing and card dealing.

Eames rolls himself out of the bed with a groan. He looks up at the mirror again, waiting for the other shoe to drop, maybe the rest of the outfit, too.

Nothing.

On bare feet with toenails painted fuchsia, wearing a loose buttonless shirt and ill-fitting slacks he walks towards the door of his soap sterile cell.

He pulls at the door-handle and the door swings open to reveal a large expanse of water, ebbing at his feet.

The water is sapphire and twinkling, far rippling, quilting the ground for miles.

Eames reaches down, dips his hand into the tide. It’s cold, thick and biting. He licks the gritty salt from his fingers, tastes the prickle of pepper.

 _(Why shouldn’t, if it’s an illusion, it be able to taste like an orange?_ he asked fifteen years ago.)

“Arthur?” he shouts as loudly as he dares.

It whispers across the thin, glittering sea.

Eames squints into the bright, sunless sky. He’d forgotten the restrictiveness of the tight bones of Estella, the elastic sinews of her.

The water replies in gentle waves that Eames steps into barefoot, ice to his kneecaps. Shivers like the tide.

He wades into the shallow sea with purpose, aimless contention in every step.

Right from the beginning, Eames made sure that Estella was built strong. She fights the crosspatch current of the water and Eames thinks, if he really were a woman, he wouldn’t mind being her.

The sky is white blue crystal and he strides over the sharp bedrock, barefoot, skin farm tough.

Quicksilver fish slink and twitch around his feet.

Eventually, he sees it.

The boat, that salt scratched wooden tub, drifting like a bloating corpse towards him. Bobbing on the surface, little more than a cork in a bathtub.

He reaches it quickly enough, bolstered by the elation of the freezing water and bloody tears stinging the soles of his feet.

A man, standing tall in the boat’s cradle. Shapely gazelle grace, he’s still stretched as starvation but there’s fire in his eyes.

Arthur grins at him from the helm, a wild face, oddly furious. He’s wearing a shirt rolled up at the sleeves and tan slacks.

Eames grins back, a little perturbed and a little hopeful, too.

He’s  _here,_ he’s found him.

He steps right up to the boat and Arthur’s face, it’s lovely, and it contorts into disgust. He’s horrified and he’s angry and he shakes his head.

The oar in his hand clatters into the stubbed hull of his vessel and no sooner has he reached close enough to touch the invading siren that stands in his surrounding waters, Arthur raises his hand and swipes hard through the air.

The slap cracks like thunder, electric.

Estella’s bronze head snaps to the side with the weighty force of the blow.

Eames feels it in his soul, if such a thing ever truly existed. He looks back at Arthur, tears in his eyes from the sting.

Slowly he tilts his head for another hit.

(All those Catholic masses, they never convinced him to turn the other cheek. He just waits for another strike to the same side, because half a face of hurt is surely better than getting clobbered all over. He’s spiteful, see, like all he ever learned can be found in the trees of Gethsemane.)

Arthur takes the offer with relish twice more. He slaps Estella hard enough to surely make his own hand bruise.

Then he lifts the other hand, too, palms open and he pushes at her hard, a choke in his voice.

Eames could stagger, maybe, but that’s not what Arthur wants. So, he lets his heel catch into the stones below the water’s surface and he tumbles back onto his arse, the chill of the splash dousing him entirely.

He wipes the peppery salt out of his eyes with a hand too big to be Estella’s, over a face too scruffy, too.

He shivers and gasps, Bedfordshire in his voice, his father’s voice.

He’s Eames again, or maybe Alex.

(He’s not very sure anymore.)

“You didn’t listen,” Arthur says, cracked.

“She couldn’t remember the name of the boat, Arthur!” Eames grunts, drenched and shivering as he clambers upright. “Maybe you should have been a bit more  _specific_ , hmm?”

But the joke is lost in Arthur’s devastation. His face scrunches with hurt and Eames looks down to the lip of the boat and he sees it, sees the gilded name in a loop of letters.

_Romany Grace_

It guts him, meat cleaver heavy. Those traitorous letters knitted together in his memory, it’s a violation and a curse. Those words don’t belong here, not in Arthur’s mind, they don’t belong to  _Arthur_.

A sound falls out of Eames that he doesn’t recognise, nor does he really know what it was meant to be. He looks at Arthur, really looks at him, sees the same bleary need as he saw the first time, lying on that bed, whispering,  _You got my message_.

“That really was you, up there,” he says quietly.

Arthur looks mildly offended, and it’s such a normal expression on that lovely face Eames almost smiles. He probably would do if he didn’t feel like his intestines were being torn out.

“Of course it was me,” Arthur tries to growl but it gets caught like butter in his throat, comes out soft.

Eames traces the letters on the boat with his thumb like a charm come undone.

Betrayal ices over him, bone deep like the water could never be. He doesn’t know if it’s  _his_ betrayal or Arthur’s, all he knows is that he has fought too fucking hard since he was nineteen years old for it to come to this.

“No,” he says, vehemence and dishonour. “Don’t you  _dare_ do that to me.”

“You said you’d let me burn,” Arthur says, fists toddler tight, his face red. He stands in his little island of wood and his mouth wobbles. “But you _owe_ me. You owe me this much, Alex.”

Contrary to every other person on this planet’s belief, Eames has never hated Arthur before.

Disliked him, avoided him, bullied him, adored him.

But hate is such a self-destructive force. It’s sharpened at both ends and cannot be wielded carefully, as Eames has long learned.

Right now, hatred poisons him.

He looks at this water creatures he broke all of his own rules for and he hates as he hasn’t in years. The spores of his disappointment have come loose, taken root inside him and grown into epicentres of hatred, webbed inside his organs against his will.

Arthur stands in his rowing boat and the fight drains out of him. Eames watches it happen like the wilting of a child’s balloon.

“Tell me about Romany Grace,” he says.

Eames pulls in the corners of his mouth to hide the way it bends to the sadness inside him.

“You already know,” he says, cracked and resentful.

“You never told me,” Arthur insists, petulant and grave.

“No,” Eames snaps. “You extracted it from me, remember?”

Arthur, he doesn’t apologise, not for anything.

But if Eames could admit to one secret in his heart, it’s that he wishes Arthur would apologise for that.

“Tell me,” Arthur says.

Eames’ thumb is still running around the curl of the  _G._  He looks at Arthur’s face, high above his own as he stands in his boat. He looks up at a pair of dark, lovely eyes that beg him.

“She was my best friend,” he says, not for the first time.

“She was your mother’s horse,” Arthur corrects him.

Eames blinks. Doesn’t nod, doesn’t need to, because Arthur  _knows_. He saw it unfold in Eames’ head without permission.

“My mother didn’t take her when she left. Couldn’t, seeing how my father bought her and he got almost everything.”

Arthur bends down until he’s sitting. Eames almost joins him, but his joints are stiff with cold and he thinks he might still be shaking.

“When I was fourteen, she broke her leg. I convinced my father to have a vet take care of her. It took months but eventually she healed. Not enough to gallop, but she could walk.”

She lives inside Eames’ head, still, the gentle beast in the paddock.

He looks at the name, carved into the boat.

“She wasn’t the same, though. She was violent, loud. Wouldn’t let anyone near her and one day, in the stable, she kicked me hard enough for my father to hear from inside the house. I was on the ground and Romany Grace was bucking like a cut snake and he strides out with his pistol.”

Eames swallows the rocks in his mouth, guilt a burden he never really shed.

“He shot her,” he lies, just to see if Arthur will make him say it.

“No, he didn’t,” Arthur says and Eames laughs, that disbelieving strangled sound that Cobb made down the phone, back in Paris when this plan felt doable, felt  _survivable._

He shakes his head.

“No,” he agrees. “He put the pistol in my hand and made me shoot her, so I would learn not to try fix any more broken things.”

Eames looks back at Arthur, his loud eyes full of questions.

No.  _One_ question.

“I’m not going to shoot you in the head, Arthur.”

Arthur looks crestfallen.

Looks unsurprised. Looks bitterly frustrated. He’s got something in his hands. A postcard from Athens with a pencil sketch of the Eiffel Tower on the back.

“Do you think I survived this long by staying sane?” he asks quietly, thumbing the corners of the card. “Eames, if you bring me back, I’ll be dead in a day. If you  _dare_ put me through that shit. Make me suffer the reality checks and the goddamn withdrawal after fuck knows what drugs they’ve got me on.”

“Arthur –”

But before Eames can say anything more, something explodes inside Arthur.

Whatever it is, it’s so violent a streak of indigo cracks open the sky of Arthur’s subconscious.

The water on the ground swells and rises in a gust of waves and it reaches Eames’ hips so fast he sways and his feet are lifted up off the bed of stones. He's almost submerged as he grabs the lip of the boat and Arthur leaps to his feet as it rocks and groans under him.

“I waited!” he roars and the tears that stream down his face cut rivers like blood into his cheeks. He grabs Eames’ shirt to hold steady and his face is hot, close, heaving. “It’s been years, Eames!”

His forehead knocks into Eames’ and he cries, lost, lost like Iran with a gun in his hand that he doesn’t want to use ever again.

“I’m not waiting anymore, Eames, I’m  _dying!_  And you need to help me finish the job. I lived this life! I lived lots of them and do you know what? _None_ of them with you, because I was so afraid of them finding you that I locked you up in a burning building until I forgot your fucking face.

“I haven’t loved you in  _years_ , maybe I never really did, but it never stopped me wanting to keep you safe. And now, you walk in like a martyr – which you’ve  _never_ been – and all I want is one lousy bullet!”

The air in Arthur’s lungs rattles out of him like scree on a slope. The tidal air howls, drowning his voice, echoing it into the beyond.

His fingers bruise Eames’ shoulders as rain lashes above them and Eames thinks, if this really is Limbo, he’s glad he’s never been before. It’s too big, this dream. It’s vast and changing and very clear Arthur has total control of it, but no desire to exercise that dominance anymore.

The boat tips and tilts and Eames scrambles inside so heavily he brings the waves with him. Arthur’s still yelling but it’s only thunder and Eames shouts, too.

Shouts Arthur’s name,  _all_ of his names, and holds him by the neck and presses their foreheads together like it’s 2004 and when the wind peaks like an avalanche, he, too, screams rage into the void.

.

.

 _Do you love me now?_ he asked.

But the answer, of course, was no.

.

.

His hands are wet in Arthur’s hair, fingers tightly knotted in the dark strands. His palms cup the tectonic plates of his skull like an infant’s.

Arthur’s forehead is bruising his eyebrows, his hands are on his neck.

They kneel in a rowing boat, splinters in their legs.

The sound of the water has vanished. The ebb of the tide no longer rocks them.

Eames opens his eyes, butterfly blinks over Arthur’s eyelids. He pulls back slowly, not quite letting go of that precious head.

“Arthur,” he dares, to an answering chuff of breath.

Arthur looks at him, ghosts in his eyes, mouth as kissable as ever and that’s what Eames does, to the astonishment of them both.

He kisses that wildcat’s mouth, just once. Quick and clean, like it’s the first time.

“Darling,” he says to the man he never quite loved enough. “You haven’t even heard my plan yet.”

The water has cleared, leaving a bed of silt and sand in every direction.

The sky, rent apart into bursts of constellations, has been plunged into the gloom of dusk.

“Come on, come on now,” he says when Arthur doesn’t move.

They shift upwards together, Arthur led by Eames’ guiding hands. He’s ragdoll steady and almost topples out of the boat.

The ground is cool and fresh on their burnt feet.

“Come with me,” Eames says. “Come with me now.”

And Arthur does.

.

.

 _I broke you once_ , Robertson said, but it was only half true.

.

.

They walk for miles, bare feet and wet hair.

Arthur asks about Cobb and Ariadne.

Eames lies about both and he thinks Arthur probably knows he’s lying, though he doesn’t call him out on it.

“They didn’t take me under at first,” Arthur tells him. “I don’t think they dared. I wasn’t the first person they’d caught. They killed Tess Farley, did you hear?”

Eames shakes his head. He’d never known Farley, just another lost dreamer in the elusive, intimate underworld they inhabit.

“I think I almost convinced one of them it was Brandon. Why were you wearing  _her_ when you got here?”

Eames sighs very quietly. He’s never understood what Arthur has against Estella so much. She got a lot of jobs done for them, once upon a time.

“Are you going to explain how I got here at all?” he asks instead of answering.

Arthur looks at him, doe eyed glory.

“Robertson brought you three layers down, but he’d never dare go lower. They don’t like more than two, really. But I don’t need the PASIV, once they’ve got me under. I can hide.”

Eames kicks up a dusty cloud of sand as he walks.

The shadows over the ground are bruises at best, deep as the ones Eames can feel lingering topside over his body like splashes of paint.

“Hide how?” he asks.

“Imagine all the –”

“Arthur, the last thing I need is a lecture from  _you_ on imagination,” Eames responds.

It’s an instinctive parry, Federer’s backhand and it startles a laugh out of Arthur, followed by a slap of his arm.

“You know the parallel universe theory. All those worlds side by side, untouchable?”

“The regretful idiot’s desperate attempt to find meaning in his life, yes,” Eames agrees a peeved twitch.

“Well, it’s possible in a dream.”

Eames stops.

Arthur does, too. Turns to smile at him with odd fondness.

It’s a darling look, a real-life Wendy Darling Grin.

About them, all is still.

(Deserts aren’t still, not really, not ever. But Arthur doesn’t know that because Arthur is a city boy.)

Eames imagines it, all those identical worlds aligned, full of crevices that the mind can grip the way fingers would only slide past.

He  _sees_ it, all those little hairs splitting apart at the ends into new threads of spun gold.

“Of course,” Eames says. Then another laugh, even more surprised than Arthur’s. “Of  _course_ it is. You’re brilliant. All you’d really need is a bit of illusion architecture, layer up the dream’s atmosphere. Maybe a few good mirrors –”

“Then slip behind the cracks,” Arthur finishes, weak enthusiasm shining in his face. “Mal’s principle of belief.”

“If you don’t know it’s there, it isn’t...must be exhausting to maintain, though,” he murmurs, silky as the sand underfoot. “That’s why Robertson kept losing you.”

Arthur nods and they keep walking, closer now, only a whisper between them.

“I got lost,” he admits. “Or, I lost track. Forgot how many walls I’d jumped through. They could have woken me up a hundred times by now and I don’t think I’d know. They probably did.”

Eames can’t help but agree. There’s no way they haven’t had Arthur in and out of Limbo like a yoyo by now.

He doesn’t say as much. Wants to preserve this victory.

The last secret that eluded him, after inception was proved true. The one too clever for him to think of.

( _You can’t fathom the possibility that someone else might be cleverer than you,_ Arthur yelled in Thessaloniki and that was true at the time, but it’s a tiny fraction less true, these days.)

“So what Ariadne and Cobb saw…” he figures aloud.

“A few versions I’d built,” Arthur explains.

He says it guilty, says it solemn, and maybe Cobb or Ariadne would be angry but it’s a  _masterpiece_ as far as Eames is concerned.

“I’m not going to kill you, you know,” he says. “You’ve got valuable information.”

“I’ve got memories of sawdust and a lot of agitation,” Arthur corrects him irritably.

He stamps away through the sand full of raised hackles and damp pride.

Eames doesn’t bother to chase him, just follows the deep trenches of his footprints, watching his outline shrink into itself.

“You still haven’t heard my plan!” Eames shouts.

The wind picks up Arthur’s reply, muttered to hell’s gods. Carries it back to Eames on wings of shame.

.

.

“I don’t want to know your plan,” Arthur says.

Snarls it like a fire hissing into oblivion because he’s an ox-headed child at the best of times and Arthur, well, he’s never been further from his best than right now.

.

.

**(you are unforgotten)**

.

.

 _There’s something I need you to do_ , Eames had said.

Ljubljana, scorching, waiting.

 _I’m walking into the lion’s den and I need your help_ , he had said.

The knife in his hand heavy.

 _Although I have no reason to trust that you will give it to me_ , he had said.

Which was true, only not really.

.

.

And then, of course, the reply.

Snake belly soft. A threat or a promise, there was no way to know.

.

.

_I’ll be there. Of course I’ll be there._

.

.

**(and adored)**

.

.


	5. PART FIVE

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The close.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh my darlings, finally I have finished it. 
> 
> Thank you so much to any and all following this series, and thank you in particular to: Malachi_the_Fierce, IAmANonnieMouse, ihaveauseforyou, breathofmidnight, Owaya1 and MadGirlWithoutABox for your comments. They mean so much to me! 
> 
> The next story in this series, which I have started working on (more regular updates, hopefully…) will be TRANSIENT and will be told from Cobb’s PoV. That’s right, I am leaving Arthur for last and very nervous about it. For any Cobb haters (there seem to be a few out there..?) give him a chance! It will be jam packed with a boldly daring Mal, a young cross Arthur and a charmingly belligerent Eames. It will also, of course, contain answers to a few more questions.
> 
> Thanks so much again to all readers, reviewers and kudosers (is that a word?), if you like the angst-fest, I’m getting close to finishing up my somewhat extended series Resplendence, and have a new story in the works.
> 
> Let me know your thoughts… Have a great April, gals and guys.
> 
> Always,  
> LRCx

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.

He slides into the booth and Eames pretends to be startled. Looks up with wide eyes and parted lips and curved eyebrows.

“Well, look who it is,” he says, silken as the honeyed whisky in his glass.

“The woman in the blue skirt at the bar wants to sleep with you,” Young King Arthur says with an air of pompous disapproval.

Eames allows the smile threatening his expression to break through as he takes in the younger man’s pinched expression. It’s adorable, really, that scrunch in his nose, the thinness of his lips as he pretends to be above such base desires.

Lieutenant Jeremy Howard sits ramrod straight with both hands wrapped around the bottleneck of his beer, as if he doesn’t know he’s basically a walking invitation to get the aloof fucked out of him. Eames considers asking him if he’d rather be called  _Holmes_ instead of Arthur.

He refrains for a number of reasons, mostly because he likes the name Arthur. He prefers the idle ridiculousness of magic over intelligence, knows it probably rankles this incredibly intelligent young man to be reduced to a legend that involves a sword literally being stuck inside a rock.

There’s little charm to Lieutenant Howard and even less whimsy. He’s sulky and dedicated and disdainful and Eames honestly has no idea why he keeps coming back to this bar, but he does.

They sit together in a back booth, nursing their drinks and arguing their way through the house’s questionable playlist of pop rock and jazz.

Sometimes they go up to the bar together. Eames usually tries to goad his drinking partner into competitive flirting with the bartender, but it doesn’t really work. This Young King is too finely tuned to paired conversation, seems to have difficulty branching out into inviting others to get involved.

It’s a wonder he hasn’t been hazed out by his fellow dreamsharers already, to be perfectly honest.

Eames likes him, though.

(He’s known that for a while.)

He likes the tenacity of his determination and the ferocity of his brilliance. Likes the way he doesn’t seem to know it’s borderline pornographic to hold his beer bottles to his mouth like that. Likes the way he has no trouble leading a team of men at least five years his senior through a jungle of snipers and coming out with no casualties.

Young King Arthur is a paradox and Eames likes him a hell of a lot.

Young King Arthur likes Eames, too.

(Eames has known that one for a lot longer.)

It’s innocent. A snooty, indifferent crush, like the way Eames felt about his Maths teacher during his O Levels. Harmless, healthy feelings for someone who is responsible for you in an untouchable, authoritative kind of way. Therapeutic emotional transfer.

.

.

Eames tells himself that this tumour of attraction that Arthur is slowly cultivating is benign.

.

.

(Eames is lying to himself.)

.

.

**(by those who would ignore)**

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.

The desert of Arthur's subconscious extends, a galaxy of sand and salt.

They walk together as they did through Cairo, their knuckles knocking dryly against each other every few steps, the rhythm of their movements tallying a score of brushes.

Eames doesn’t try to talk Arthur out of his anger. It’s a constant companion, has served Eames more bruises than several less favourable acquaintances over the years.

Arthur’s young here, younger even than he is topside. He’s golden and thin and angry.

Night presides over them like a vast crown of stars.

“We should wake up soon,” Eames says, when it becomes clear that the sky shan’t clear as long as Arthur’s fury lingers.

“Why?” Arthur spits. “I didn’t realise you were so eager to go into that good night, Eames.”

Eames considers pointing out it’s  _his_ turn to be melodramatic, but refrains. With decades of Limbo under his belt, Arthur’s earned the right to be a little dramatic.

“You’re lucky Rigby didn’t just give you up as a bad job already,” Eames mutters.

Arthur arches his eyebrows, stones in his eyes. Eames hangs his head.

“Lucky?” Arthur scoffs.

“You know what I mean,” Eames grumbles.

Arthur slows his walk.

Far ahead, the horizon is a dark, dusty pink. The sound of the ocean rumbles beneath them, tectonic whispers of secrets unspoken.

The sand under their feet shifts like snakes.

“We made the right choice,” Arthur says, the same hollow confidence with which he told Eames the same in Cape Town, years ago.

And just like in Cape Town, Eames nods without really believing it.

“Do you really have a plan?” Arthur asks.

Eames nods again, this time without the falsity.

“So, we have to wake up,” Arthur says, childlike, courageous.

Eames shrugs one shoulder, casting about them, taking in the endless dunes of Arthur’s sorrow.

“Well, yes,” he says. “But not until –”

He’s interrupted by a shrill wail, like wind through reedy treetops. The sandhill beneath them trembles, Eames stumbles and he reaches, reaches out to Arthur, who slips down the sloping avalanche.

“Eames!” he bellows, just as his legs give out beneath him and Eames tries to take hold but the sea, it roars, the sand consumes them, the sky is rent apart to the split-scree sound of their screaming and the last thing he sees is blood in Arthur’s dark, unforgiving eyes.

.

.

Eames wakes up.

.

.

**(the veil of grace)**

.

.

 _Do you really have a plan?_ he asks, and Eames thinks,  _I hope so._

.

.

Ullo Ingman, former Op Som Operative, doesn’t take kindly to being approached by his ex-Captain turned convict.

His steel eyes haven’t softened in the absent years that separate them from their last meeting. He’s not a soldier anymore, but like his counterpart Jeremy Howard he still holds himself like one.

There’s a readiness in his body even as he sits back in his hard, chrome chair.

“Which one were you?” he asks as Eames helps himself a seat.

He had initially considered reaching out to Ingman first, but in times of need Eames’ instincts have been his only friend, and this time his instincts had told him an ambush would suffice.

So, when Eames gets to Brussels, two months after Arthur called him with his shitty goodbye speech, he simply waits until Ingman returns to a quiet bar alone for a third night in a row and walks straight inside after him.

He’s clocked instantly, of course.

Ingman’s mask of serenity is bone white, his mouth thin, while Eames casually orders a gin martini, thanks the bartender and carries it directly to the ex-soldier’s table.

“Which one were you?” Ingman asks and to his credit, his voice doesn’t waver.

Eames grimaces.

“You know who the other one is, then.”

Ingman narrows his eyes.

“Well I can guess now,” he says through gritted teeth.

There’s something close to resentment in his tone. Maybe at not being told before, maybe at not being invited along in the first place.

“Did you know they’d caught him?” Eames asks.

His hand is too tight around his martini. He doesn’t dare take a sip.

Something flickers shadow-fleeting over Ingman’s expression. His shoulders loosen.

“Who managed that?”

Eames cocks his head and decides Ingman isn’t toying with him.

“I don’t know exactly,” he admits. His fingers slip over the condensation of the glass in his hand.

Ingman lifts his bottle of lager up and takes a long drink. He is the picture of collected resolve, up until the moment the bottle  _thunks_ too hard back down onto the table, making him flinch.

“How did he get caught after all this time?”

Eames is surprised by the heavy blow this question lands to his chest. It’s a deep, bruising question, maybe because it fills him with such impotent regret, or perhaps it is embarrassment, an ugly of shade of second-hand shame.

“He left the wrong man alive,” he mutters, doesn’t attempt to hide his fury, doesn’t deny even to himself he  _blames_ Arthur for this, all of this. The fear and the fumbling and the way he wants to drive his fist into the intangible swarming of his upset.

Ingman smiles. It stretches his face, like it’s forgotten how, comes out wan and distorted.

“He always was soft,” he says unkindly, because the truth, it isn’t kind. “Ruthless bastard, but he never really got the hang of a decent clean up.”

Eames doesn’t deny this, because the truth, it isn’t kind at all.

Only, he never thought of it as a true weakness before now, before it left a hole ripped in the fabric of his universe. Young Jeremy Howard, who was so distraught to discover that stealing a man’s thoughts is obsolete unless you can prevent them from spreading further.

Ingman seems to know his train of thought.

“So, not military,” he says, figuring out his uninvited drinking partner like a puzzle. “Special Services?”

Eames tilts his head in acknowledgement.

Ingman chuckles, another long pull of his beer.

“What do I call you?”

“Eames.”

“Eames,” he tests distrustfully. “Like –”

“The chair. Yes. Like the chair. And don’t bother, I’ve heard them all before.”

Ingman shrugs in wry defeat, and when he licks his lips for a moment Eames half expects a forked tongue to come out.

“Well, I’m Vinsen now,” Ingman says. “A  _consultant.”_

The word seems to leave a bad taste in his mouth.

“I know,” Eames replies brusquely. “Do you  _consult_ with anyone currently working off the grid?”

Ingman pulls a despairing expression.

“Yes, I know,” Eames snaps hotly. “So, you haven’t heard anything.”

“Not a peep,” Ingman admits coolly, and Eames mostly believes him.

“Would you call me if you did?”

Ingman gives him a hard look as he asks it. It’s accusatory and it’s resentful and it’s long, a long drawn out silence of wasted calculation.

“Would  _you_ call?” he retaliates.

Eames bites the tip of his tongue to hold back his impatience.

“Yes,” he says, and to his utter dismay it comes out fervent.

Fervent and fevered, like a phone call a million miles away.

Ingman finishes his beer, then reaches into his jacket.

Time suspends like the last wisp of a stormy cloud and Eames feels his own hand gravitate to the gun in his coat. His lungs contract and his heart quietens.

Then Ingman, smiling knowingly, pulls out a small rectangular card, dark grey, thick. There’s a phone number written on it, otherwise blank.

Eames stares at the number for sixty-five seconds, then pulls a pen from his pocket and writes down another on the back. Ingman tucks the card into his wallet, dropping a ten euro note on the table.

“I think you were Dolos,” he says as he stands, wrapping a long red scarf around his neck.

Eames leans back in his chair.

“What makes you say that?” he asks.

Ingman laughs again, a reedy chuckle.

“Jeremy always seemed to know more than he let on,” he says. “Like he could dream up knowledge in his head.”

He leaves before Eames can reply.

The ten euro note mocks him innocuously.

The bar doesn’t fill beyond the few patrons already here, already drinking, already whispering. There’s a classy jazz tune simpering through the room and it grates on him like a curse.

He leaves soon after, his martini untouched, the hand that held it chilled to the fine bones of his palm, the phone number seared into his mind.

.

.

**(behind your lies)**

.

.

Eames wakes up.

.

.

Eames wakes up in a burst of silence, the ringing, explosive bellow of the dream’s collapse, as if it had shredded his eardrums into shards of glass. Pain shoots through the crystal specks that were once perhaps neurons, he can feel his blood vessels swelling and through the buzzing numb he can feel a scream tearing out of his throat.

His eyes clench closed and he’s tight, holding his breath in his lungs like tar, stretched and compounded like wet clay.

_Crack._

Cold skin slaps his cheek, an open palm, forcing the air out of his lungs and the silence, it shatters.

_“Fucking Jesus – this isn’t – we can’t – there’s no way –”_

Deep, predatory, resonant. Robertson scolding,  _scalding,_ his panic the big red button stuck on  _pushed._

Lights dazzle Eames’ eyes, glittering in hollow spots over faces, muting the features of his frantic captors. He can feel white hot burning and he tries to shift but every piece of him is pins and needles, teeth and claws.

There’s a rattling inside him that might be his bones and his tendons are steel traps under his skin.

“If he goes into cardiac arrest, you’ve just thrown away  _months_ of efforts!” a woman shouts, that twang, that tang, Rigby, transatlantic, Chanel No. 5.

Eames shakes violently, and it shrieks through his prickling limbs, he didn’t even know stomach muscles could feel numb but his do, everything does.

White light trapped in his eyes like diamonds, he can still smell the desert, wants to feel the sun, to escape into it if he has to.

He’ll take the scorch of that fiery death over this.

“Is he crashing?”

They argue, they squabble, Eames feels vomit surge up through him, choking him, he heaves and bucks and a pair of hands hold his shoulders and he wants to cry out, but it tastes of sand, everything tastes vast and stretched and fluorescent.

“Get him up, get him up!” a voice shouts, a new one, a nasal fierce scratched voice, it shouts with a piped authority, a knowingness.

Eames sinks into the heavy abyss and the pain rises the wave.

As they turn him, boneless, rigid, wracked with shudders, his head flops over and he sees Arthur, the real one, his skin stretched over his bones so finely it’s little more than lace over broken glass.

He needs a shave and his hair is too long and Eames stares and stares and stares.

Arthur stares back, with eyes that see nothing familiar.

.

.

 _You’re the worst person in the world, Eames,_ he said.  _But you’re not._

.

.

This time, Eames stays awake.

.

.

Blood drips to the floor in heavy spots; thick, crimson splashes on squeaky lino.

Eames’ arm hangs over the edge of the bed, out of the way and red streaks down from his shoulder where he got too close to the knife.

 _Who brings a knife to a gunfight?_ he thinks listlessly.

There’s a medic, her expression pinched in displeasure and for once Eames thinks it isn’t solely aimed at him.

She’s cleaning up the slash marks with cotton ball brutality, no care for the stinging hisses she’s eliciting from her patient.

Eames doesn’t have it in him to do more than twitch. He stares across the room to Arthur’s bed, stares at that blank, starved face and tries not to think about how long it’s been since someone touched that pasty skin with anything resembling affection.

It’s been a long time since Eames thought of him as the Young King, but he does now, with achingly dangerous nostalgia.

Without warning, the medic starts stitching him back up. He winces, grunts incoherently.

Arthur’s eyes roam aimlessly across the ceiling, unseeing.

Eames thinks about Manchester, the  _not-England_ one, the pretend one. The way those strong hands grasped him tight and boyish as he carried a writhing Arthur into that measly, off-white hospital.

How he’d begged,  _Don’t leave me Alex, Alex please, don’t let me die, I’m going to die Alex, please._

How Eames had torn himself from that childlike need and walked away so easily.

Could he do it now? he wonders to himself.

 _Yes,_ a small voice says in the drift of his thoughts, which might just be a lie.

The medic, her small hands, her bitter silence, starts to wipe a cloth down his thumping jugular.

“Va-t-il survivre ?” he asks in a hush of words, like a lingering dream.

She stops, finally. Stands up and packs her things. She’s got a lot of freckles and strawberry blonde hair that’s too warm a shade for this cold room, a sprite of healing energy.

“J’espere,” she replies, like a shock of cold water through his body.

Eames blinks, tries to focus on her face but she moves too quickly.

She leaves, and her soap-sand smell remains.

He wonders if he imaged her, dreamed her like a wish come true.

When he moves, his stitches tug uncomfortably, a curve over his shoulder, another line across his chest.

Outside, he can hear Robertson, his commanding voice looming even when he isn’t present.

The door opens.

Eames fixes his eyes on the puddle of blood next to his bed. Two pairs of shoes, just in sight. Black, shiny, laced.

“Think you can get anything out of them?” Robertson asks, sounds disbelieving, sounds patronising and petulant.

The heavier pair of shoes steps closer, legs crouch and a face swims into view.

Hair blond, slick, short. Eyes of steel. The face peers through Eames’ fog of bloody brain slurring.

“I’m sure I can,” Ullo Ingman replies, his face grimly disapproving.

Across the room, Arthur’s thumb twitches over his palm.

.

.

_Will he live?_

I hope so.

.

.

In Cape Town, on Eames’ 28th birthday, he gets drunk, shouts at the only person who might be a real friend, and cries, well and truly cries, for the first time in years.

Arthur, his friend Arthur,  _his_ Arthur.

Arthur stays.

He watches Eames with spooked-horse furtiveness and he buys lots of food. It’s very obvious he doesn’t have a natural, caretaker instinct.

Might even be worse than Eames, which is saying a lot.

The difference, of course, is that Arthur clearly doesn’t know how to take care of another person because he has never found himself in a position that involved  _taking care_ before.

Eames knows plenty about  _taking care._

He just has no interest in it.

.

.

They are swiftly moved to something closer to a cell than a hospital ward.

Any lingering effects of shock in the prisoners are promptly ignored. They are dropped on cots in their shared cell with all the ceremony of mucking out stables.

Eames thinks that if Arthur had shown a single indication that he was even close to lucid, they’d have been kept in such closeted isolation he’d have started howling for a beating just to get some attention.

As it is, Eames understands they think they can break him with hopelessness, that he’ll slowly give in piece by piece if he stagnates in his own fear of this shell of a human being lying two feet away from him.

This relies on his own susceptibility to feel concern for anyone but himself, of course, and he’d like nothing more than to inform them that they are wasting their time.

Arthur blinks slowly, drugs and forgetfulness and despair.

Eames thinks that, maybe, they aren’t wasting their time.

.

.

(But he might be.)

.

.

“Do you know why I’m here?” Ingman asks, standing at the foot of Eames’ bed.

He’s no longer strapped down  _thank fuck_ but he’s still barely strong enough to stand up anyway.

“I suppose you’re the one to thank for my heart attack,” Eames croaks back instead.

Ingman’s face is unreadable.

“It was only a mild seizure,” he retorts coolly.

Eames’ eyes drift a little towards Arthur. Ingman huffs, a burst of air like an eager dog pushed away at the nose.

 _“That_ might have been a mini-stroke,” he says, nodding to Arthur’s enervated expression. “But more likely he was already like this after being in a continual dream-state since March.”

Eames tries to ask what day it is, but the words stick like caramel to his teeth.

He tries to shift in his bed, is pleased to find it doesn’t hurt as much as it did yesterday when they brought him in.

Ingman seems to notice, too. He tilts his head with a questioning gaze.

“Are you here for all my secrets?” Eames asks.

His heart feels very big in his chest. He’s not entirely sure it was just a seizure, because this is different, the very fabric of him feels different, like he’s forging himself.

“You lied to all of us,” Ingman says.

Eames smiles placidly in response.

“So did they,” he says after a moment. Then, “So did he.”

Ingman’s eyes flit to Arthur and back. His grimace is badly concealed.

“When they’re done, they’ll kill you,” Ingman warns him.

“As is their right,” Eames shrugs regretting it instantly when it jars his concussion.

Ingman purses his lips in what might just be agreement.

.

.

(In thirty-six hours, Robertson will be dead and Rigby will be unconscious.)

.

.

(They, on the other hand, will be free.)

.

.

Ingman takes a seat, groaning metal over stone.

Eames doesn’t acknowledge him at first. He is too busy breathing through the blistering after effects of a very vivid and very unexpected nightmare.

He can’t remember the last natural dream he’s suffered, but there’s no mistaking the blur of splashing colour and rising screeches of metal and tarmac that he has just experienced.

Senseless and painful, it’s left Eames feeling horribly vulnerable, as if his very mind has betrayed him with these flashes of life inside his mind, which has been deathly quiet for so long, as close to peaceful as he ever hoped he might get.

Now his mind is loud, it’s screaming to be set free, tries to wrestle itself from his parched, sour mouth but all that comes out is a wallowing moan.

Ingman reaches out with one blurry hand and Eames draws back, deeper into the shallow pillow beneath his heavy bruised head.

“Alright,” Ingman mutters under his breath, steady as a horse hand. “Just me.”

Eames snuffles a laugh, one that trembles in the air between them.

They are being seen, they are being heard. Eames can feel it on his skin like a mist.

Ingman’s eyes are clear water on a summer’s day, his face pale and his blond hair still damp at the tips.

He always was a patient student.

Committed, and full of the kind of fire that either kept a person alive for too long or stole them quick as a match strike.

Eames had liked him, even then. Even when he took to the torturing as easily as the extracting, salmon in the slipstream of dreams.

“You bought him over in Cairo,” Ingman says, to which Eames has no answer.

Ingman’s eyes flit to Arthur, who is awake. He’s been awake every time Eames has looked over. A listless, spiralling kind of awake. An unreal awake.

“He was the reason you came to Egypt at all. You came back for him.”

Eames blinks up to where he thinks there might be a camera. His head swims drunkenly and the muscles of his face are locked up with all the strength of early onset rigor mortis.

Ingman tilts his head.

“And Brandon Osmond?”

Eames thinks he might smile, but it’s hard to tell. He tries to swallow and his throat clicks, dry and scratched.

Ingman nods, then shakes his head, correcting himself.

“No, he wasn’t your type. Not clever enough for the likes of you. Or susceptible.”

It’s unclear how much of this is for show and how much is the real Ingman bleeding through, with his real wonderings and his real thirst for the truth. Eames used to be so good at reading people, it’s been his art since he was a child and now here before him sits a man so unreadable it is as if his every movement is written in Aramaic.

There’s a breathy pull of air and Eames looks to the other bed. Arthur’s eyes are on their guest.

There’s curiosity there that wasn’t before, but it’s a bleak sight. It twists Eames’ guts into knots.

“I have all the time in the world,” Ingman says. “We could sit here for thirty years, if you like.”

That prickles something in Eames’ memory, a flash of warning like a big blinking red light.

Ingman’s eyes are soft, his expression open.

“Well if you aren’t going to ‘fess up, I suppose I should fetch Robertson. I’m sure he’ll want in on this chat.”

He brushes himself down as he stands, looking mildly disappointed.

Eames smiles weakly, squashes the bubbling in his stomach as he watches Ingman leave.

Thirty minutes to take off.

.

.

It happens as quickly as the shredding of a dream, Eames hears it like the tolling of a bell. A ricochet of gunshots and the shuttering of the power.

Like a dreamer who has long suspected, only to figure it out all at once.

.

.

“You owe me a lot, Captain,” Ingman snarls as he tears back into the cell, heaving Eames to his feet and catching him as he staggers.

“You almost killed me,” Eames reminds him, disoriented and aching, nails in the ball of his feet. His tongue sticks unpleasantly to the roof of his mouth.

“It was a  _seizure,"_  Ingman grunts. “It wouldn’t have – shit, come on.”

Eames swallows down the sour saliva that floods beneath his tongue, nausea searing through him like pins through a cushion. He wobbles as he follows the curved direction of Ingman’s stoop, until they are between them scooping a limp Arthur up out of the cot.

“It’s not far,” Ingman groans, taking most of the weight while Eames struggles with Arthur’s legs into a false, limp standing and his own anxious stomach that’s twitching somewhere between his lungs. “Can you walk?”

Eames doesn’t answer, because if he opens his mouth he’s almost certainly going to vomit.

And truthfully, he doesn’t know if he can, so he just  _does._

Heaving one foot after another, his shaking hands tightly gripping Arthur’s arm slung over his shoulder, the other digging into his waist for support. His head hangs down and he feels dense, deathly.

“That’s it, boy,” Ingman mutters under his breath and Eames feels a spark of indignation, first at being called  _boy,_ then by the realisation Ingman isn’t talking to him at all.

He forgets, sometimes, he wasn’t always the only one to whom Arthur was the  _young one,_ the one to be protected, to be guarded and secreted as both a weapon and a child.

He can taste copper and he can smell rank sweat and he can hear everything all at once. Arthur’s breath and the ghosts of dreams like a fountain.

Eames stumbles, catches himself on the wall. There’s a crack of a gun and up ahead a body crumples.

“Almost, almost,” Ingman growls, sweat dripping down his face as he sinks a little lower to the ground under Arthur’s weight.

They pass two bodies that Eames, who has never before in his life been squeamish, can't quite bring himself to look at.

Then the sunlight hits them with a vengeance.

Eames scrunches his eyes shut and there’s a dry, retching sound of protest that he thinks might be Arthur. The heat is intense, a strange tropical heat, it’s burning them as they drag their feet over the dirt towards a large four-wheel drive.

“Driver’s mine,” Ingman puffs, as a backdoor swings open and together they start tugging Arthur inside, Eames first to pull him in, though the strain on his swollen brain is almost too much. He’s blinded by the heat and the sky and the terrifying promise that this might actually work, they might actually be free.

“Drive!” he hears Ingman shout but there is only this: a body in his arms, in sore need of a wash and so heavy with fatigue it sinks through Eames into his own bones, but here, safe, alive, awake, if only barely.

That Young King he teased into flirting with a bartender, the point man who stayed in Cape Town even when Eames had nothing more to give, when he could only keep taking.

Something hopeful explodes within him. His mouth is on the crown of Arthur’s head, even though his weight is crushing Eames’ fractured ribs and the sweltering of the car seems to be melting his insides.

“Fuck me,” someone snarls but Eames, he doesn’t care, doesn’t listen, doesn’t know anything as he puts a cautious hand on the face tucked close to his hammering chest.

Outside, the sky is vivid and blue.

.

.

**(and see only)**

.

.

 _Ná déan dearmad, tá ár n-aghaidh i bhfolach,_ Eames will say when he stares up into the gun, one moment of suspended time before the bullet punches through him.

.

.

It will happen in a warehouse. It will be dark. There will be a camera and a gun and Arthur will whisper like a charm,  _I don’t understand,_ in a language he doesn’t remember learning.

Eames will want to apologise better, but he will find he doesn’t have the words.

It will be quick, in the end. Twenty years in the making, it will end with the snap of a trigger.

He’ll be dead before his body crumples, before Arthur’s follows, too.

.

.

**(this, us)**

.

.

Eames falls asleep, not because he is in any position to do so, but because his exerted body demands it of him.

He dreams again, rapid flashes of lightning moments, heavy in wakefulness.

A hand pulls him from the submersion, ruffling over his elbow, which is probably by this point the only uninjured part of him.

“We’re here,” Ingman says quietly.

The driver, sunglasses and leather gloves and a black canvas jacket, stares straight ahead.

“Let’s do this,” Eames thinks he says, although the look Ingman throws him, hurried worry and confusion, makes him wonder.

 _(I need to get to Slovenia,_ he told his father. But he also told him,  _And I need to get out again with a second person._ Which isn’t quite true anymore, there’s an extra one, but maybe, just maybe…)

It’s a plane. Tiny, rattling and not a soft edge in sight, but no matter.

Harry Dalrymple, Eames thinks, a truly awful human being and yet, somehow, still not the worst father in all of history.

Ingman carries Arthur with some effort, while Eames limps behind with his hands over his face to hide from the light. Everything is cotton wool thick and he’s starting to worry that Ingman was lying, that that wasn’t just a seizure at all, that something really is wrong with him.

His hands keep shaking and his muscles are spasming and he feels ready to drop every second he’s awake.

“I know where to go,” Ingman says brusquely when Eames gestures wildly, gipping as he tries not to throw up.

He’s sipped some water and dribbled a few droplets from the bottle into Arthur’s mouth. He’s waxy and bony and limp as a wet noodle, and those eyes, they keep looking at him like he’s no different from Adam, from the Devil himself.

It hurts, even through the numb. The aeroplane is loud and Arthur is quiet and Eames, he thinks he might die soon anyway, even if they do make it back to London in time.

.

.

They don’t fly to London.

.

.

**(pretending)**

.

.

All those years ago, when he burst into the barracks in Iran, little more than tent flaps and sand.

He remembers it now, the smell of the dead air and the way Arthur had been lying so still on his bunk.

The way he’d looked up at Eames’ gasp of wordless noise, the way he’d fallen out of the cot and staggered to him so fast. Eames had slipped as he caught him, and they’d fallen to their knees.

He had looked so young, so very, very young. Eames brushed his hair from his face while tears streamed down his young, puppyish cheeks and he sobbed, over and over,  _I killed him they made me I killed him they made me I killed him I killed him I didn’t I wouldn’t I killed him they made me._

He was so distraught. It tormented Eames in the quiet dark of the months that followed before Istanbul, the way Young King Arthur’s hands had grasped the front of his shirt and the way he had pressed his wet face into his neck and begged for forgiveness for a crime that didn’t even rank compared to the red staining Eames’ hands.

 _You owe me,_ Arthur bellowed.

And,  _I’ve been following you since I was a teenager._

.

.

It's all so fucking true.

.

.

Maybe Eames could have predicted it then, in Iran, while the boy shuddered with impotent sadness and wept for a dead prisoner whose real name he’d never know, but whose face would show up in the projections of his dreams for the rest of his life.

.

.

They don’t fly to London, and maybe if Eames had been able to stay awake for longer than fifteen minutes at a time, it would have been different, but he couldn’t, so it wasn’t.

.

.

Ingman wakes him up roughly, and it takes Eames ten seconds to open his eyes.

Takes him less than one to know something is wrong.

“Where are we?” he asks gruffly, stomach pounding and lights dancing in front of his eyes as he battles the nausea.

“London was a no-go,” Ingman says. “We’re going to a place I know. A safehouse.”

 _There’s no such thing,_ Eames thinks, as sharp and clear as if it had been spoken aloud, and he’s not sure where it comes from, but it leaves him with dread in the place of the adrenaline that their escape had so briefly pumped through him.

Ingman’s driving, and Eames doesn’t remember getting into a car but here he is. A lurching fear echoes through him and he wishes more than anything in this world right now that he had Arthur’s good sense to keep a totem.

At this, he starts, turning wildly despite his dizziness and sees Arthur sitting buckled into a back passenger seat beside him. The car is speeding, groaning at Ingman’s merciless driving, and Arthur is  _sitting up and looking at him._

“Arthur?” Eames asks, only to receive a dimpled frown.

Arthur looks ready to get knocked down by the nearest feather, but he stares back at Eames, mouth wobbling around his silence

“How long has he been like this?” Eames demands. Ingman’s eyes find his in the rear-view mirror.

“His alertness started to improve a couple of hours ago,” he says uneasily. “Still no sign of recognition, though.”

Bones creaking, joints sticking together, Eames reaches one hand, brushes the cotton of Arthur’s thin shirt. Startled, Arthur withdraws his arm. Something very close to a sound echoes inside his closed mouth.

There’s a thrumming, Ingman’s fingers on the steering wheel. It’s louder than everything else. It’s consuming the air in the car. It’s dictating Eames’ thundering heartbeat.

“I was right, then,” Ingman says coolly from the driver’s seat., conversational cucumber despite the two possibly dying fugitives in the back.

Eames makes a questioning noise.

Ingman huffs loudly. The trilling pattern of his fingertips changes.

“You  _are_ Dolos,” he says. He sounds oddly disappointed. “Isn’t that a bit like setting yourself up to fail?”

Eames ignores the bait. Ingman’s welcome to be a total arse as long as he keeps driving away from civilisation and the trappings that come with it.

“You kill them all?” he asks.

Even as he asks it, he finds he doesn’t much care. All the same, Ingman’s grimace isn’t encouraging.

“Robertson, yes. Rigby will probably live, although her quality of life after letting you both get away  _again_ is probably in question.”

Eames tries to laugh. Beside him, the hollow shape of Arthur turns his head.

His lips are shrunken, chapped. The sockets of his eyes are so greatly exaggerated they’ve become two scoops inside his stretched skin.

“Arthur,” Eames whispers to no reward. Then, “Jeremy.”

Nothing.

Arthur blinks, one hand twitching up, spider curl of spindle fingers.

Eames takes it boldly, their dehydrated skin sandpapering over each other but this time Arthur doesn’t flinch. His thumb bends in what Eames could easily pretend is a weak attempt at squeezing back, if he had any self-denial to spare.

(He doesn’t.)

Outside their windows, parched greenery that might be any number of European countrysides. Eames considers asking where they are, but ultimately decides he doesn’t care. Maybe even doesn’t  _want_ to know.

Ingman would probably lie anyway.

Arthur’s fingers are cold.

In the dim, Eames hears that wretched voice scream  _I waited!_

Hears that same voice whimper,  _if you bring me back, I’ll be dead._

Eames looks at this skin and skeleton body, the blank eyes and the wrong-turned mouth surrounded by the scruff of an unfamiliar beard.

He thinks that probably, like always, Arthur was right about that.

But Eames, he’s selfish, he’s such a selfish villain. He can’t bring himself to regret it.

.

.

Time swallows him.

Blood leaks through his innards and he remembers all the things he hid from himself, from all the retained pieces of him that became  _Eames._

.

.

He remembers his father, the way he shoved that gun in his hand and bellowed, _Shoot her, Alexander!_

The way Romany Grace toppled in on herself before the shot had stopped ringing in his ears.

.

.

 _You are going to get him, aren’t you?_ That unlikely voice asked, with baffling faith that was unfounded, was in fact long disproven.

.

.

_And Eames? Thank you. For what you did._

.

.

The safehouse is a warehouse.

It’s abandoned, full of leaks and only half of it has electricity. There is nothing and nobody for miles, which should make Eames feel safe.

(It doesn’t make him safe, not at all, not one bit.)

Ingman is aloof and impatient as they shuffle as a trio of shared weight inside, where mattresses of questionable cleanliness and boxes of questionable contents are stacked.

Ingman helps settle Arthur into a seat and Eames, he stands very, very still. He presses his fingers into the tender swell of his bruised face.

The colour is draining out of everything.

He can taste fear like an herb, the panic of grey stealing over everything. Thudding echoes through him, deeper than his heartbeat.

“Captain?” Ingman says, forgetting himself as he hurries to catch Eames, but he pulls back.

“Something’s wrong,” he says. He’s sure of it.

Ingman is too close and Arthur is too far. He’s staring up at them both with childlike wonder and Eames wants to cry, wants to run, can’t do either because there’s a sloshing, spilling sound that he’s starting to worry is blood leaking into his skull from the inside, ready to ooze out of his eyes and his ears.

He imagines dropping dead right now, leaving Arthur all alone, this shell of a person he loved without meaning to.

Ingman tries to take his hand but then a choking sound erupts out of Eames and he drops to his knees.

Dark globs of blood splatter on the floor as his stomach convulses. A colossal hyena cry roars out of him, agony inside his very nerves tearing into the bliss of numb and Ingman’s hand on his head.

A voice, shallow and meek, one he’s never heard before.

“Le do thoil,” it says, water trickling among young reeds.

A great breath. Eames swallows air and bile wet in his throat and looks up from his hands and knees.

Arthur, looking at him, looking  _at_ him, so precious and quiet and  _looking at him._

“What?” Ingman gasps.

Again that voice, while Arthur’s mouth moves with it.

“Le do thoil,” he says with flat inflection, a voice of sharp death.

“What does that mean?” Ingman asks.

Eames makes a rumbling, bleary sound, a triplet of coughing bird laughs.

“It means  _Please,"_ he croaks.

Arthur’s face is old and young and fucking beautiful, something hiding in those eyes that he doesn’t understand, but it’s alive.

Arthur, in there, screaming to be set free.

“An dthigeann tú mé?” Eames asks, ignores Ingman’s disgruntled ignorance.

“Tá brón orm,” Arthur replies, the consonants almost entirely lost in the expended effort.

Slowly, wincing and shuddering with the effort, Arthur pulls himself upright. He almost topples over at first.

Then, shuffling his miraculous unsteady feet, makes his way to Eames, kneels in the pooled blood to put his hands on Eames’ face.

He isn’t mindful of the bruising and the shock of pain almost blinds Eames as something touches his head, he almost throws up again.

It doesn’t matter though, he thinks when the fog clears.

Arthur’s eyes, they are hazel and cocoa and alive.

“Holy fuck,” Ingman laughs, leaning back on his heels to stare at them both.

Eames pays him no heed.

He stares at Arthur’s solemn expression, and the earnestness in his eyes, like he’s seventeen all over again.

.

.

 _I’ve had a vision,_ Eames’ mother told him the day before his eighteenth birthday.

It was a lie.

He’s spent his entire life avoiding tea leaves and ouija boards and candelight vigils, never believed her anyway, not really.

Yet he knows, in this moment, in a spark of unexplainable, inexplicable dread, with a certainty that belongs only to reality and the wicked haunts of the wise, that this time tomorrow he will be dead.

.

.

(He’s right.)

.

.

**(beecharmers unarmoured, disguised)**

.

.

In that bed, after the sweat has cooled into a dry, crackled night.

The stars are loud, the owls louder still. The moon is kissing everything the colour of frost.

“Do you love me now?” Eames asks, and Arthur kisses a purple thumbprint on his arm in response.

Looks up at him with eyes of reluctant want, eyes that know him, that yearn and reject with dizzying ferocity.

Eames wants that, wants that look all for himself.

.

.

He wants it now.

.

.

“Arthur,” Eames says at the close. “Arthur, listen. I know you don’t understand why, but I need you to know that I’m sorry.”

“For what?” Arthur asks, full of unreckoned fear.

It’s the same voice that whispered down the phone  _I’m scared_ with such sorry surprise six months ago, ten lifetimes ago.

 _For everything,_ Eames should say, but that simply isn’t true.

On the floor behind him, six of his fingernails, bloody, skin bitten.

There’s an infection under his skin. He can feel the bubbling boil of his brain.

He looks at Arthur, the thinness of him, the blood on his jaw. Kneeling beside him, shivering, all shoulders and eyes.

“For pretending,” Eames murmurs, half a keel into oblivion. Arthur’s confusion a wound. “For forgetting Alex.”

“Who’s Alex?” Arthur asks.

Eames laughs, really laughs, quiet as it is, as much as it hurts.

What a cruel fate, that his greatest rival, that former being he once inhabited, should be gone for good, now, just like he always wanted, just like he needed, right when it doesn’t matter anymore.

Arthur’s looking at him like he has all the answers, the way he did in Washington and in Iran and in New Zealand. This is the only time that maybe Eames actually does.

So, “Who’s Alex?” Arthur asks.

And Eames, he replies, “Someone you loved,” which is simply very true.

.

.

**(to be invincible)**

.

.

It happens like this.

.

.

A caterwauling cry, horror and vengeance.

Arthur’s blood dropping to the floor through his fingers.

Ingman’s face ghostly pale, the twist of his mouth in sheer horror.

The butt of a gun, then the barrel.

A phone pressed to his sweaty cheek, the dial tone.

The way he begs with futile need, feels the siren song of his ending like the curved wing of a swan, a velvet curtain dropping.

The blinking red light of a camera recording.

.

.

“Ná déan dearmad,” he says at the close. “Tá ár n-aghaidh i bhfolach.”

.

.

 _Do not forget,_ he says at the close as he stares up into that vicious, volcanic face, his heart thundering with the rot in his blood.  _Our faces are hidden._

.

.

Arthur’s weight, his blood, his love.

The crack of the gun echoing, the wail of a horse as it flees.

He dies instantly.

.

.

Three thousand miles away, a plane soars into the clouds.

Outside, the sun rises over the outskirts of Bucharest.

There is only the earth’s grave quiet to hear it.

.

.

**(and brave)**

.

.


End file.
